Maps

House-Island and Provincial Town Map

The shift of  power in southern  Ireland during the early decades of the twentieth century can be mapped through the literary spaces of the Anglo-Irish House-Island and the Provincial Town.  Depictions of the former speak to the decline of  Protestant Ascendancy Big House culture, whilst the latter represents the rise of the Catholic bourgeoisie in provincial  Saorstát na hÉireann.  In their respective  ‘Big House’ novels, The Last September (1929)  and Mad Puppetstown (1931), Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane,  writing  as daughters of the landed Anglo-Irish, depicted the disintegrating lifeworlds  of  their minority culture during the Irish War of Independence. Conversely, the town of Mellick  in the Kate O’Brien novel  Pray for the Wanderer (1938) acts as a polemical metonym for her native Limerick, and the increasingly binding relations between family, class, religion, gender and sexuality which emerged in southern Ireland following independence.  The map vectors and tabs above,  illustrate the symbolic shift of power  from the Ascendancy estate  lifeworlds of a ‘culture in decline’ to what  O’Brien perceived emerging in the early days of the predominantly Catholic  Irish Free State:

A pretty scene - tranquil and traditional, modestly civilized       [. . .] for all the thoughtful world, a thing of ruins and archaisms.

Pray for the Wanderer (NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938) p. 42

Discussing the Anglo-Irish landed estate,  Bowen noted ‘ . . . Life in these house-islands has a frame of its own,’ (1)  and observed that ‘the hermetic solitude and the autocracy of the great country house, the demonic power of the family myth, fatalism, feudalism and the “ascendancy” outlook,’ (2)  coincided with a ‘Protestant experience during the Irish revolution [which]  ranged from massacre and flight to occasional inconvenience and indifference, from outraged opposition to enthusiastic engagement.’ (3)   The  novels of Bowen and Keane provide insights into a  rural hegemony which had remained largely hidden within the Anglo-Irish estate: ‘For over two centuries this culture had largely presided over a feudal-like agrarian system which towards the end of the nineteenth century was heavily undercapitalized and bedevilled by such phenomena as middle-men, subletting, absenteeism, and evictions, it was one of the most backward economies in Europe and remained so well into the twentieth century.’ (4)   The Last September and Mad Puppetstown can also be read as ‘psycho-biographies that  are very situation [and] culture specific,’ (5)   and illustrate the declining space of the ‘house island’ in which ‘ghosts relieve their anguish in the ruined houses of the Ascendancy.’ (6)   Bowen’s personal perspective emphasised the secluded nature of life upon an estate: 

. . . each of these houses, with its intense, centripetal life, is isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical fact of space: the isolation is innate; it is an affair of origin. It is possible that Anglo-Irish people, like only children, do not know how much they miss. Their existences, like those of only children, are single, independent and secretive.

Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court & Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (London: Virago, 1984 [1942] ) p. 20.

Bowen’s novel The Last September concerns the lifeworld of an Anglo-Irish family living in a landed estate named Danielstown,  located close to the British garrison town of Clonmore in Cork, during the summer of 1920.  The novel depicts the experience of  Lois Farquar,  orphaned niece of Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, who is engaged to a British officer. The Naylor’s son Laurence is home from Oxford for the holidays, and the family hosts Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency and a single woman named Marda Norton, as seasonal guests. Because of class and cultural prejudice, Lady Naylor is not comfortable, or happy with Lois’ engagement. She eventually persuades the working class British officer, Gerald Lesworth, that it is his duty to end his romantic relationship with Lois. Gerald, rebuffed by the class whose property interests he is defending,  is killed in an IRA ambush.  His death foreshadows the destruction of Danielstown by Republican guerrillas. As The Last September closes, Bowen paints a picture marked by fear and the singular absence of  Ascendancy ‘house-islands’ from the north County Cork landscape:

For in February, before those leaves had visibly budded, the death –execution, rather –of the three houses, Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night. A fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness; indeed it seemed that an extra day, unreckoned, had come to abortive birth that these things might happen [. . . ]  It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning.

The Last September, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1929 [1942]) p. 206

The family estate, framed Bowen’s literary ‘gaze’ over the rural Cork triangle created by the towns of Mallow, Fermoy and Mitchelstown. The closest village to Bowen’s Court was Kildorrery; the largest being Doneraile. A spatial genealogy seems to have informed her work     ‘The land outside Bowen’s Court windows left prints on my ancestor’s eyes that looked out: perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me.’ (7)     Concerning her writing, Bowen cryptically claimed that the idea of ‘place’ was central to understanding her fiction, and that:

Bowen topography has so far, so far as I know, been untouched by research. Should anyone give it a thought after I am dead, that will be too late. To it, only I hold the key.

‘Places,’ in Pictures and Conversations (London: Allen Lane, 1975) pp.35-36.

The subject of Molly Keane’s 1931 novel Mad Puppetstown though considered ‘a lighter rehash of the fading Ascendancy world explored by Bowen,’ (8) is conversely different from Bowen’s experience and representation  of  period and place during the Irish War of Independence. Keane’s fictional estate of Puppetstown survives the early ‘Troubles,’ while her family’s actual estate was destroyed during the conflict; the opposite was true of  the relationship between Bowen’s literary and family estates.  Keane recalled:   ‘It was a god-awful shock for my father who was a belligerent little Englishman. Everyone had warned him, had said you must come back and live in England and bring the children there, but he said  “I’d rather be shot in Ireland than live in England.”  He wouldn’t leave when they came to burn down the house.’ (9)   As an adolescent, Keane was invited to stay at an  estate located in the heart of  ‘fox and hound’ country in County Tipperary, owned by Major Perry, an established figure hunting circles: ‘I almost lived there for six of seven years, mostly in the winter months, when I hunted three days a week on horses largely provided by Woodroof.’ (10) The estate influenced her subsequent literary depictions. Her novel Mad Puppetstown commences in 1908,  and we find the estate at the height of its glory with Major Chevington,  Easter’s father,  lord of the manor house. The extended family living in Puppetstown’s ‘house-island,’ is composed of Easter’s two cousins Evelyn and Basil, their widowed mother, Aunt Brenda, and Aunt Dicksie, a spinster.  As Keane opens her novel she provides a detailed glimpse of the social conventions, styles and manners that comprised elements of  the Ascendancy’s habitus preceding the start of  the first world war: 

Then:-
   They said: “You naughty man!” They wore hair nets and tortoise-shell combs.           
It was more than fast to accept presents from men.
   You bought a blood four-year-old up to weight for £60.
   There was no wire.
   They talked about “the ladies” and “motor cars.” “By George!” they said, but never used Americanisms; such were not known.
   Their top boots were shorter and their spurs were worn lower down on the heel.
   You loved with passion.
  
Mad Puppetstown  (London: Virago Press, 1985;1931) pp 1-2.

Life on the estate however begins to decline with the death of the Major in the First World War; the 1916 Rising brings revolution to Ireland, and over two-hundred Anglo-Irish Estates are burned out as a result. However despite being deserted by the majority of the family, Puppetstown survives the conflagration. At the end of the novel,  Easter returns with her cousin Basil  to their childhood estate in the early days of Saorstát Éireann. As she stands in the hall of  the house, Easter is taken back by its sense of  abandonment and decay:

We expected it to be larger and heartier, and the servants to look after us, and Aunt Dicksie delighted to see us and everything like it always was. We didn’t expect to find a turkey sitting on eggs in the hall, nor all those bulbs, or that frightful slack –that was only fit to be put down a rabbit-hole –for dinner, or the smell of cats, or no water, or nineteen beds in my room. 

Mad Puppetstown (London: Virago Press, 1985;1931) pp 270-271

In contrast, Kate O’Brien’s  perspective in Pray for the Wanderer dissected and critiqued  the social and political milieu of the Catholic petite bourgeoisie which supported Saorstát Éireann’s adoption of the 1937 Bunreacht Na hÉireann. Fianna Fáil’s social legislation of the 1930s was increasingly vetted by a Catholic hierarchy and clergy, and the 1937 Constitution bore their imprimatur. In tandem with cultural nationalism the State and Church had ‘anathematized everything from jazz to modern fiction,’ (11)   in an attempt to assert the Catholic identity of the newly independent Irish state. Subsequently, writers such as O’Brien faced the ‘symbolic institution of the much reviled Censorship Board in 1929’ (12) and consequently played the role of dissident in the public sphere of post-independent Ireland.  The street where Boru House,  the home into which O’Brien was born had expanded considerably during the nineteenth century due to the influx of rural migrants, and in the historic sense, proliferated spaces reflecting an emerging  provincial urban modernity:

The creation of Mulgrave Street provided the space for important new institutions such as the Artillery Barracks (1807), the County Infirmary (1811), the County Gaol (1821), the District Lunatic Asylum and the Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery (1849).

J. Logan,  Family and Fortune in Kate O’Brien’s Limerick,  p. 115

The modern institutionalisation of space in O’Brien’s early life milieu seems to have imbued her with and awareness of the centrality of place as a means to anchor essential themes in her writing.   Pray for the Wanderer’s main character is Matt Costello, an ex Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer, successful writer and dramatist, who at the age of thirty-seven,  returns from England to the provincial town of Mellick in the West of Ireland. Costello is fleeing a failed love affair with a stage actress in London, an imperial city shadowed by the gathering storm clouds of the Second World War.  In the provincial milieu of Mellick, ‘under the drug of memory and tradition,’ Costello hopes to re-assemble his life, and possibly make a new beginning.  As he facetiously tells his old friend, a solicitor named Tom Mahoney, he wants to ‘find out what Dev is really doing for Cathleen Ni Houlihan’s four green fields.’ As Costello and Tom saunter down one of Mellick’s thoroughfares on a May evening, O’Brien’s depicts the tendrils of modernity slowly creeping into the Irish provincial town of 1937:

The wide Georgian street looked noble, beautifully lighted by cold arc lamps.
‘Shannon Scheme?’
‘Yes. Good, isn’t it?’
‘Fine. A creditable-looking town. Up, Dev!’

Pray for the Wanderer (NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938) p. 93; 69; 159

Costello who fought in the Irish War of Independence, and during the 1920s achieved international reputation as a playwright, is seeking refuge and emotional exile in his home town, even though his works have been banned under the Free State’s Censorship Act of 1929. In a discussion with Mahoney, and a local priest, Costello refutes the Saorstat legislation:

‘I reject censorship, lock, stock and barrel.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is a confession of failure. It is a denial of human judgement and understanding, and a gross intrusion on liberty.
 [. . . ] Sheer impertinence- and an example of that fatal tendency in all modern government to level down, not up. In any case, too many negative regulations are a symptom of weakness in any authority. 

Pray for the Wanderer (NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938) pp. 205-206.

At the close of  Pray for the Wanderer,  Costello decides upon exile and leaves the insularity of his native country for the cosmopolitanism of New York City. Before doing so, he turns his thoughts to the socio-cultural environment of Mellick:

This uncrowded landscape, flowing peace. This easy sense of God and of right and wrong, God save Ireland. There might conceivably be some general hope in such salvage.

Pray for the Wanderer (NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938) p.307

Within the space of the Provincial Town , it can be surmised that O’Brien has created an ironic spatial metaphor to symbolize the social and political discourses which operated in the Irish Free State following independence.

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