Victorian Age Emglish Literature

In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniversary of
Queen Victoria's coming to the throne. "British history is two thousand years old," Twain observed, "and yet in a good
many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two
thousand put together." Twain's comment captures the sense of dizzying change that characterized the Victorian period.
Perhaps most important was the shift from a way of life based on ownership of land to a modern urban economy based
on trade and manufacturing. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution, as this shift was called,
had created profound economic and social changes, including a mass migration of workers to industrial towns, where
they lived in new urban slums. But the changes arising out of the Industrial Revolution were just one subset of the radical
changes taking place in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain among others were the democratization resulting
from extension of the franchise; challenges to religious faith, in part based on the advances of scientific knowledge,
particularly of evolution; and changes in the role of women.
All of these issues, and the controversies attending them, informed Victorian literature. In part
because of the expansion of newspapers and the periodical press, debate about political and
social issues played an important role in the experience of the reading public. The Victorian
novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life, represented many Victorian
issues in the stories of its characters. Moreover, debates about political representation involved
in expansion both of the franchise and of the rights of women affected literary representation, as
writers gave voice to those who had been voiceless.
The section in The Norton Anthology of English
Literature entitled "Victorian Issues" (NAEL 8, 2.1538
1606) contains texts dealing with four controversies that
concerned the Victorians: evolution, industrialism, what
the Victorians called "The Woman Question", and Great Britain's identity as an
imperial power. Norton Topics Online provides further texts on three of these topics:
the debate about the benefits and evils of the Industrial Revolution, the debate
about the nature and role of women, and the myriad issues that arose as British
forces worked to expand their global influence. The debates on both industrialization and women's roles in society
reflected profound social change: the formation of a new class of workers men, women, and children who had
migrated to cities, particularly in the industrial North, in huge numbers, to take jobs in factories, and the growing demand
for expanded liberties for women. The changes were related; the hardships that the Industrial Revolution and all its
attendant social developments created put women into roles that challenged traditional ideas about women's nature.
Moreover, the rate of change the Victorians experienced, caused to a large degree by advances in manufacturing,
created new opportunities and challenges for women. They became writers, teachers, and social reformers, and they
claimed an expanded set of rights.
In the debates about industrialism and about theWoman Question, voices came
into print that had not been heard before. Not only did women writers play a major
role in shaping the terms of the debate about the Woman Question, but also
women from the working classes found opportunities to describe the conditions of
their lives. Similarly, factory workers described their working and living conditions,
in reports to parliamentary commissions, in the encyclopedic set of interviews
journalist Henry Mayhew later collected as London Labor and the London Poor,
and in letters to the editor that workers themselves wrote. The world of print
became more inclusive and democratic. At the same time, novelists and even poets sought ways of representing these
new voices. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel,Mary Barton, in order to give voice to Manchester's poor,
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to find ways in poetry of giving voice to the poor and
oppressed.
The third section of this Web site, "The Painterly Image in Victorian Poetry," investigates
the rich connection in the Victorian period between visual art and literature. Much
Victorian aesthetic theory makes the eye the most authoritative sense and the clearest
indicator of truth. Victorian poetry and the Victorian novel both value visual description as
a way of portraying their subjects. This emphasis on the visual creates a particularly
close connection between poetry and painting. Books of fiction and poetry were
illustrated, and the illustrations amplified and intensified the effects of the text. The texts,
engravings, and paintings collected here provide insight into the connection between the
verbal and the visual so central to Victorian aesthetics.
Britains identity as an imperial power with considerable global influence is explored
more comprehensively in the fourth topic section. For Britain, the Victorian period witnessed a renewed interest in the
empires overseas holdings. British opinions on the methods and justification of imperialist missions overseas varied, with
some like author Joseph Conrad throwing into sharp relief the brutal tactics and cold calculations involved in these
missions, while others like politician Joseph Chamberlain considered the British to be the great governing race with a
moral obligation to expand its influence around the globe. Social evolutionists, such asBenjamin Kidd, likewise supported
the British dominion through their beliefs about the inherent developmental inferiority of the subject peoples, thus
suggesting that Europeans had a greater capacity for rulinga suggestion that many took as complete justification of
British actions overseas. Regardless of dissenting voices, British expansion pushed forward at an unprecedented rate,
ushering in a new era of cultural exchange that irreversibly altered the British worldview
The Industrial Revolution the changes in the making of goods that resulted from substituting machines for
hand labor began with a set of inventions for spinning and weaving developed in England in the eighteenth
century. At first this new machinery was operated by workers in their homes, but in the 1780s the introduction
of the steam engine to drive the machines led manufacturers to install them in large buildings called at first
mills and later factories. Mill towns quickly grew in central and northern England; the population of the city of
Manchester, for example, increased by ten times in the years between 1760 and
1830.
By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had created
profound economic and social changes. Hundreds of thousands of workers had
migrated to industrial towns, where they made up a new kind of working class.
Wages were extremely low, hours very long fourteen a day, or even more.
Employers often preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less
then men. Families lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing. Moved by the
terrible suffering resulting from a severe economic depression in the early 1840s,
writers and men in government drew increasingly urgent attention to the condition
of the working class. In her poem The Cry of the Children, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning portrays the suffering of children in mines and factories. In The Condition
of the Working Class (NAEL 8, 2.1564), Friedrich Engels describes the conclusions
he drew during the twenty months he spent observing industrial conditions in
Manchester. His 1845 book prepared the ground for his work with Karl Marx on The Communist
Manifesto(1848), which asserts that revolution is the necessary response to the inequity of industrial capitalist
society. Elizabeth Gaskell, wife of a Manchester minister, was inspired to begin her writing career with the
novel Mary Barton (1848) in order to portray the suffering of the working class. In Hard Times (1854), Charles
Dickens created the fictional city of Coketown (NAEL 8, 2.157374) to depict the harshness of existence in
the industrial towns of central and northern England. During the 1830s and 1840s a number of parliamentary
committees and commissionsintroduced testimony about the conditions in mines and factories that led to the
beginning of government regulation and inspection, particularly of the working conditions of women and
children.
Other voices also testified powerfully to the extremities of working-class existence
in industrial England. Poverty Knock, a nineteenth-century British folk song,
catalogs the hardships of the weaver's job. Correspondent Henry Mayhew's
interviews with London's poor portray the miseries of life on the streets. Drawing an
analogy from popular travel writings, reformer William Booth's In Darkest
England compares the dense and gloomy urban slums to the equatorial forests of
Africa. Especially dramatic are the contrasting accounts of C. Duncan Lucas, who
writes in 1901 about the pleasant "beehive of activity" that he sees as the typical
London factory, and crusader Annie Besant, who passionately analyzes the
economic exploitation of workers by wealthy capitalists. Ada Nield Chew's letter
about conditions in a factory in Crewe states strongly the case for improving wages
for the tailoresses who "ceaselessly work" six days of the week. These sharply
different perspectives define an important argument in the debate over
industrialism: Was the machine age a blessing or a curse? Did it make
humanity happier or more wretched?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Cry of the Children

In 184243, a parliamentary commission investigated the conditions of the employment of children in mines
and factories; the commission's report was written by R. H. Horne, a friend and collaborator of the poet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (18061861). Many of the details of Browning's 1843 poem are taken from the
report of the commission.
"Alas, my children, why do you look at me?"

Medea >> note 1
I
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Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing toward the west
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
II
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Do you question the young children in the sorrow

Why their tears are falling so?
The old man may weep for his to-morrow
Which is lost in Long Ago.
The old tree is leafless in the forest,
The old year is ending in the frost,
The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,
The old hope is hardest to be lost:
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,
In our happy Fatherland?
III
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They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their looks are sad to see,
For the man's hoary anguish draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy;
"Your old earth," they say, "is very dreary,
Our young feet," they say, "are very weak!
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary
Our grave-rest is very far to seek.
Ask the aged why they weep, and not the children;
For the outside earth is cold;
And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,
And the graves are for the old."
IV
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"True," say the children, "it may happen

That we die before our time.
Little Alice died last year her grave is shapen
Like a snowball, in the rime.
We looked into the pit prepared to take her.
Was no room for any work in the close clay!
From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,
Crying, 'Get up, little Alice! it is day.'
If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower,
Many of the historical changes that characterized the Victorian period motivated discussion and argument
about the nature and role of woman what the Victorians called "The Woman Question." The extension of
the franchise by the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 stimulated discussion of women's political rights. Although
women in England did not get the vote until 1918, petitions to Parliament advocating women's suffrage were
introduced as early as the 1840s. Equally important was the agitation to allow married women to own and
handle their own property, which culminated in the passing of the Married Women's Property Acts (1870
1908).
The Industrial Revolution resulted in changes for women as well. The explosive
growth of the textile industries brought hundreds of thousands of lower-class
women into factory jobs with grueling working conditions. The new kinds of labor
and poverty that arose with the Industrial Revolution presented a challenge to
traditional ideas of woman's place. Middle-class voices also challenged
conventional ideas about women. In A Woman's Thoughts About Women (NAEL 8,
2.159697), the novelist Dinah Maria Mulock compares the prospects of Tom, Dick,
and Harry, who leave school and plunge into life, with those of "the girls," who
"likewise finish their education, come home, and stay at home." They have, she
laments, "literally nothing to do." Likewise in Cassandra (NAEL 8, 2.15981601),
Florence Nightingale, who later became famous for organizing a contingent of
nurses to take care of sick and wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, writes
passionately of the costs for women of having
no outlet for their heroic aspirations.
Popular representations of Florence Nightingale, "The Lady with the
Lamp," reflect the paradox of her achievement. While her organization
of nurses was an important advance in hospital treatment, the image of
her tending the wounded seems to reflect a traditional view of woman's
mission. Even Queen Victoria herself represents a similar paradox.
Though she was queen of the British Empire, paintings and
photographs of her, such as Winterhalter's The Royal Family in
1846, represent her identity in conventional feminine postures and
relationships.
Texts in this topic address both the hardships faced by women forced
into new kinds of labor and the competing visions of those who exalted
domestic life and those who supported women's efforts to move beyond
the home. Journalist Henry Mayhew's interviews with a seamstress and
a fruit seller vividly portray the difficulties of their lives. In Of Queen's
Gardens John Ruskin celebrates the "true wife," and Elizabeth
Eastlake's "Lady Travellers" proposes her as a national ideal, while
inThe Girl of the Period Eliza Lynn Linton satirizes the modern woman. In contrast, two fictional characters,
Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre and George Gissing's Miss Barfoot, from The Odd Women, speak passionately
of the wish that their existence be "quickened with all of incident, life, fire, and feeling." All of these texts show
how complex the debate was on what the Victorians called "The
Woman Question."
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kraal agree in their want of the knowledge and virtue of the higher culture. But positively, their mental and moral
characteristics are utterly different. Thus, the savage life is essentially devoted to gaining subsistence from nature,
which is just what the proletarian life is not. Their relations to civilized life the one of independence, the other of
dependence are absolutely opposite. To my mind the popular phrases about "city savages" and "street Arabs" seem
like comparing a ruined house to a builder's yard.
Race and Victorian Science
Benjamin Kidd, from The Control of the Tropics (1898)
The Anglo-Irishman Benjamin Kidd (18581916) was a civil servant and amateur naturalist who became a best-selling
author with his controversialSocial Evolution (1894). The Control of the Tropics was published in 1898.
***
The next principle, which it seems must be no less clearly recognized, is one which carries us a great stride forward
from the past as soon as we begin to perceived the nature of the consequences which follow from its admission. It is
that, nevertheless, there never has been, and there never will be, within any time with which we are practically
concerned, such a thing as good government, in the European sense, of the tropics by the natives of these regions.
The ultimate fact underlying all the relations of the white man to the tropics is one which really goes to the root of the
whole question of the evolution which the race itself has undergone. The human race reached its earliest development
where the conditions of earliest development where the conditions of life were easiest; namely, in the tropics. But
throughout the whole period of human history the development of the race has taken place outwards from the tropics.
Slowly but surely we see the seat of empire and authority moving like the advancing tide northward. The evolution in
character which the race has undergone has been northwards from the tropics. The first step to the solution of the
problem before us is simply to acquire the principle that in dealing with the natural inhabitants of the tropics we are
dealing with peoples who represent the same stage in the history of the development of the race that the child does in
the history of the development of the individual. The tropics will not, therefore, be developed by the natives themselves.
However we may be inclined to hesitate before reaching this view, it is hard to see how assent to it can be withheld in
the face of the consistent verdict of history in the past, and the unvarying support given to it by facts in the present. If
there is any one inclined to challenge it, let him reflect for a moment on the evidence on the one side and the difficulty
that will present itself to him of producing any serious facts on the other side. If we look to the native social systems of
the tropical East, to the primitive savagery of Central Africa, to the West Indian Islands in the past in process of being
assisted into the position of modern States by Great Britain, to the Black Republic of Hayti in the present, or to the
Black Republic Hayti in the present or to modern Liberia in the future, the lesson seems everywhere the same; it is that
there will be no development of the resources of the tropics under native government.
We come, therefore, to a clearly defined position. If we have to meet the fact that by force of
circumstances the tropics must by force of circumstances the tropics must be developed, and
if the evidence is equally be developed, and if the evidence is equally emphatic that such a
development can only take place under the influence of the white man, we are confronted
with a larger issue than any mere question of commercial policy or of national selfishness.
The tropics in such circumstances can only be governed as a trust for civilization, and with a
full sense of the responsibility which such a trust involves. The first principle of success in
undertaking such a duty seems to the writer to be a clear recognition of the cardinal fact that
in the tropics the white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water. Alike
in a moral, in an ethical, and in a political sense, the atmosphere he breathes must be that of
another region, that which produced him, and to which he belongs. Neither physically, morally, nor politically, can he be
acclimatized in the tropics. The people among whom he lives and works are often separated from him by thousands of
years of development; he cannot, therefore, be allowed to administer government from any local and lower standard he
may develop. If he has any right there at all, he is there in the name of civilization; if our civilization has any right there
at all, it is because it represents higher ideals of humanity, a higher type of social order. This is the lesson which, slowly
and painfully, and with many a temporary reversion to older ideas, the British peoples have been learning in India for
the last fifty years, and which has recently been applied in other circumstances to the government of Egypt.
Race and Victorian Science

J. J. Thomas, from Froudacity (1889)
19
John Jacob Thomas (c.18401889) was the descendent of slaves, born into poverty in Trinidad. A mostly self-educated
intellectual, he was a linguist, folklorist, teacher, civil servant, philologist, and author. Froudacity was written during a
visit to London, where Thomas died of tuberculosis.
We find paraded ostentatiously enough the doctrine that in the adjustment of human affairs the possession of a white
skin should be the strongest recommendation. Wonder might fairly be felt that there is no suggestion of a
corresponding advantage being accorded to the possession of a long nose or of auburn hair. Indeed, little or no
attention that can be deemed serious is given to the interest of the Blacks, as a large and (out of Africa) no longer
despicable section of the human family, in the great world-problems which are so visibly preparing and press for
definitive solutions. The intra-African Negro is clearly powerless to struggle successfully against personal enslavement,
annexation, or volunteer forcible "protection" of his territory. What, we ask, will in the coming ages be the opinion and
attitude of the extra-African millions ten millions in the Western Hemisphere dispersed so widely over the surface
of the globe, apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilised culture? Will these men remain for ever too
poor, too isolated from one another for grand racial combinations? Or will the naturally opulent cradle of their people,
too long a prey to violence and unholy greed, become at length the sacred watchword of a generation willing and able
to conquer or perish under its inspiration? . . .
. . . Accepting the theory of human development propounded by our author, let us apply it to the African race. Except, of
course, to intelligences having a share in the Councils of Eternity, there can be no attainable knowledge respecting the
laws which regulate the growth and progress of civilisation among the races of the earth. That in the existence of the
human family every age has been marked by its own essential characteristics with regard to manifestations of
intellectual life, however circumscribed, is a proposition too self-evident to require more than the stating. But
investigation beyond such evidence as we possess concerning the past whether recorded by man himself in the
written pages of history, or by the Creator on the tablets of nature would be worse than futile. We see that in the past
different races have successively come to the front, as prominent actors on the world's stage. The years of civilised
development have dawned in turn on many sections of the human family, and the Anglo-Saxons, who now enjoy
preeminence, got their turn only after Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and others had successfully held the
palm of supremacy. And since these mighty empires have all passed away, may we not then, if the past teaches aught,
confidently expect that other racial hegemonies will arise in the future to keep up the ceaseless progression of temporal
existence towards the existence that is eternal? What is it in the nature of things that will oust the African race from the
right to participate, in times to come, in the high destinies that have been assigned in times past to so many races that
have not been in anywise superior to us in the qualifications, physical, moral, and intellectual, that mark out a race for
prominence amongst other races?
The normal composition of the typical Negro has the testimony of ages to its essential soundness and nobility.
Physically, as an active labourer, he is capable of the most protracted exertion under climatic conditions the most
exhausting. By the mere strain of his brawn and sinew he has converted waste tracts of earth into fertile regions of
agricultural bountifulness. On the scenes of strife he has in his savage state been known to be indomitable save by the
stress of irresistible forces, whether of men or of circumstances. Staunch in his friendship and tender towards the weak
directly under his protection, the unvitiated African furnishes in himself the combination of native virtue which in the
land of his exile was so prolific of good results for the welfare of the whole slave-class. But distracted at home by the
sudden irruptions of skulking foes, he has been robbed, both intellectually and morally, of the immense advantage of
Peace, which is the mother of Progress. Transplanted to alien climes, and through centuries of desolating trials, this
irrepressible race has bated not one throb of its energy, nor one jot of its heart or hope. . . .
. . . The above summary of our past vicissitudes and actual position shows that there is nothing in our political
circumstances to occasion uneasiness. The miserable skin and race doctrine we have been discussing does not at all
prefigure the destinies at all events of the West Indies, or determine the motives that will affect them. With the
exception of those belonging to the Southern States of the Union, the vast body of African descendants now dispersed
in various countries of the Western hemisphere are at sufficient peace to begin occupying themselves, according to
some fixed programme, about matters of racial importance. More than ten millions of Africans are scattered over the
wide area indicated, and possess amongst them instances of mental and other qualifications which render them
remarkable among their fellow-men. But like the essential parts of a complicated albeit perfect machine, these
attainments and qualifications so widely dispersed await, it is evident, some potential agency to collect and adjust them
into the vast engine essential for executing the true purposes of the civilised African Race. Already, especially since the
late Emancipation Jubilee, are signs manifest of a desire for intercommunion and intercomprehension amongst the
more distinguished of our people. With intercourse and unity of purpose will be secured the means to carry out the
obvious duties which are sure to devolve upon us, especially with reference to the cradle of our Race, which is most
probably destined to be the ultimate resting-place and headquarters of millions of our posterity. Within the short time
that we had to compass all that we have achieved, there could not have arisen opportunities for doing more than we
have effected. Meanwhile our present device is: "Work, Hope, and Wait!"
20
Colonialism and Gender

Because colonialism is fundamentally a power relationship between a patriarchal authority and a subordinate
people conceived as essentially different from their rulers, discourse about colonialism becomes interwoven
in complex ways with discourse about gender. Writers use images and vocabulary of racial difference to
represent female appetite and aggression, and terrifying images of female savagery often convey fear of a
racial other. By contrast, feminist writers can use the language of empire to represent the illegitimacy of male
power. They find images of sexual oppression in foreign customs like the harem, or they find analogies to
their own domination in the colonizer's rule of its colonies.
Charlotte Bront's novel, Jane Eyre, uses several of these strategies. Bertha
Mason, the wife that Rochester keeps imprisoned in his attic, is a Creole,
whose bad blood leads to her savage madness. Bront herself uses the
vocabulary of racial difference to represent female appetite and aggression.
However, when Jane Eyre resists Rochester's dominating courtship, she
imagines him as a sultan and herself as a missionary, preaching liberty to the
enslaved inmates of the harem. When St. John Rivers later tries to persuade
her to become his missionary wife and accompany him to India, the figure of the missionary becomes one of
oppression, not of liberation.
Rhetorical uses of imperial discourse to represent gender are complicated still further by the historical
activities of British women in colonies. Women traveled in the colonies, lived in them, as wives and mothers,
and worked in them, as missionaries and teachers. The relationships they portrayed between themselves as
British women and the women of the colonies were complex and ambivalent. In Anna Leonowen's book, for
example, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (the source for the musical, The King and I), she
portrays the women of the harem both as oppressed victims of a cruel patriarchal authority and as idle,
childlike creatures of appetite, who do not understand the English virtues of discipline or of work. Her own
movements in and out of the palace, and its female and male spaces, reflect her shifting relationship to
women she alternately embraces and distances.
By contrast, the social reformer Josephine Butler saw Great Britain's imperial rule as an extension of the
patriarchal domination against which she fought at home. After successfully leading the campaign in Great
Britain for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, which required tests for venereal disease of any woman
merely suspected of being a prostitute, she continued the campaign for its repeal in India and wrote
passionate essays criticizing British oppression of Indian women and rule of India, such as "Our Indian Fellow
Subjects."
At the same time that the debate about the evil of colonialism engaged writers like Butler, other writers
justified colonialism with images of demonic caricature. W. Winwood Reade, for example, identifies an entire
continent as the site of ghoulish ferocity with his title Savage Africa. Reade's most gruesome story concerns
Tembandumba, a "voluptuous and bloodthirsty" cannibal queen who embarks upon an orgy of slaughter in
the Congo, at the very heart of "savage Africa." Reade's fantasy gives a very different example of how the
discourse of colonialism and gender can intersect.
Charlotte Bront, from Jane Eyre (1848)
Charlotte Bront's novel, Jane Eyre engages the subject of colonialism in a number of ways. Rochester's
mad wife, Bertha Mason, is half Creole, the daughter of a West Indian planter whom Rochester marries in
Jamaica. Jane Eyre obtains her small fortune through her uncle, John Eyre, who had made the money in
Madeira. Jane's cousin, St. John Rivers, tries to persuade Jane to come with him to India as a missionary
and his wife. The passage below, a conversation between Jane and Rochester, in which Rochester tries to
buy clothes for Jane for their upcoming wedding, uses the image of the harem to portray Jane's sense of her
position.
***
Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of a jeweller's shop: the more he bought me, the
more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation. As we re-entered the carriage, and I sat
back feverish and fagged, I remembered what in the hurry of events, dark and bright, I had wholly forgotten
the letter of my uncle, John Eyre, to Mrs. Reed: his intention to adopt me and make me his legatee. 'It
would, indeed, be a relief,' I thought, 'if I had ever so small an independency; I never can bear being dressed
like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae >> note 1 with the golden shower falling daily
round me. I will write to Madeira the moment I get home, and tell my uncle John I am going to be married,
21
and to whom: if I had but a prospect of one day bringing Mr. Rochester an accession of fortune, I could better
endure to be kept by him now.' And somewhat relieved by this idea (which I failed not to execute that day), I
ventured once more to meet my master's and lover's eye; which most pertinaciously sought mine, though I
averted both face and gaze. He smiled; and I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and
fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched: I crushed his hand, which was ever
hunting mine, vigorously, and thrust it back to him red with the passionate pressure
'You need not look in that way,' I said: 'if you do I'll wear nothing but my old Lowood >> note 2 frocks to the
end of the chapter. I'll be married in lilac gingham you may make a dressing-gown for yourself out of the
pearl-grey silk, and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the black satin.'
He chuckled; he rubbed his hands: 'Oh, it is rich to see and hear her!' he exclaimed. 'Is she original? Is she
piquant? I would not exchange this one little English girl for the grand Turk's whole seraglio; gazelle-eyes,
houri forms, and all!'
The Eastern allusion bit me again: 'I'll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio,' I said; 'so don't
consider me an equivalent for one; if you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the
bazaars of Stamboul without delay; and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you
seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here.'
'And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of flesh and such an assortment of black
eyes?'
'I'll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved you harem
inmates amongst the rest. I'll get admitted there, and I'll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw as you
are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands; nor will I, for one, consent to cut your bonds
till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred.'
Anna Leonowens, from The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870)
Born in India in 1834, Anna Leonowens was sent to England for her education at the age of six. Her father, an
army sergeant, was later killed; her mother didn't return for her until she was fifteen. After resisting her
stepfather's attempt to marry her to a much older man, she ultimately married an army clerk with whom she
moved to Singapore. He died, leaving her impoverished, with a young daughter and son. She first started a
school for the children of British officers in Singapore, which failed; she then took the position in the Siamese
court that was the subject of her first book. She stayed at the Siamese court for five years, from 1862 to
1867. She moved to Canada, where she was involved in education and in women's issues, where she died in
1914.
***
To be free to make a stunning din is a Siamese woman's idea of perfect enjoyment. Hardly were we installed
in our apartments when, with a pell-mell rush and screams of laughter, the ladies of his Excellency's private
Utah>> note 1 reconnoitred us in force. Crowding in through the half-open door, they scrambled for me with
eager curiosity, all trying at once to embrace me boisterously, and promiscuously chattering in shrill Siamese,
a bedlam of parrots; while I endeavored to make myself impartially agreeable in the language of signs and
glances. Nearly all were young; and in symmetry of form, delicacy of feature, and fairness of complexion,
decidedly superior to the Malay women I had been accustomed to. Most of them might have been positively
attractive, but for their ingeniously ugly mode of clipping the hair and blackening the teeth.
The youngest were mere children, hardly more than fourteen years old. All were arrayed in rich materials,
though the fashion did not differ from that of their slaves, numbers of whom were prostrate in the rooms and
passages. My apartments were ablaze with their crimson, blue, orange, and purple, their ornaments of gold,
their rings and brilliants, and their jeweled boxes. Two or three of the younger girls satisfied my Western ideas
of beauty, with their clear, mellow, olive complexions, and their almond-shaped eyes, so dark yet glowing.
Those among them who were really old were simply hideous and repulsive. One wretched crone shuffled
through the noisy throng with an air of authority, and pointing to Boy lying in my lap, >> note 2cried, "Moolay,
moolay!" "Beautiful, beautiful!" The familiar Malay word fell pleasantly on my ear, and I was delighted to find
some one through whom I might possibly control the disorderly bevy around me. I addressed her in Malay.
22
Instantly my visitors were silent, and waiting in attitudes of eager attention.

She told me she was one of the many custodians of the harem. She was a native of Quedah; and "some sixty
years ago," she and her sister, together with other young Malay girls, were captured while working in the
fields by a party of Siamese adventurers. They were brought to Siam and sold as slaves. At first she mourned
miserably for her home and parents. But while she was yet young and attractive she became a favorite of the
late Somdetch Ong Yai, father of her present lord, and bore him two sons, just as "moolay, moolay" as my
own darling. But they were dead. (Here, with the end of her soiled silk scarf she furtively wiped a tear from
her face, no longer ugly.) And her gracious lord was dead also; it was he who gave her this beautiful gold
betelbox.
"But how is it that you are still a slave?" I asked.
"I am old and ugly and childless: and therefore, to be trusted by my dead lord's son, the beneficent prince,
upon whose head be blessings," clasping her withered hands, and turning toward that part of the palace
where, no doubt, he was enjoying a "beneficent" nap.
"And now it is my privilege to watch and guard these favored ones, that they see no man but their lord."
The repulsive uncomeliness of this woman had been wrought by oppression out of that which must have
been beautiful once; for the spirit of beauty came back to her for a moment, with the passing memories that
brought her long-lost treasures with them. In the brutal tragedy of a slave's experience, a female slave in
the harem of an Asian despot, the native angle in her had been bruised, mutilated, defaced, deformed, but
not quite obliterated.
Josephine Butler, from "Our Indian Fellow Subjects" (1887)
Josephine Butler was a social reformer, known particularly for her campaign against the Contagious Diseases
Acts. They were a set of laws that required any woman suspected of being a prostitute to report to a police
station to be inspected for venereal disease. Butler felt that the acts degraded women, deprived them of their
constitutional rights, and reflected a double standard. In her campaign for the repeal of the acts, Butler tried
to make the public understand why women resorted to prostitution. After the acts were repealed in England in
1886, she continued her campaign for their revocation in India. In arguing for repeal in India, she argued
against colonization. "My own profound conviction has ever been that annexation and conquest are morally
wrong. In what do they differ from robbery and theft?" She frequently made an analogy between women's
oppression in England and women's oppression in a colonial system.
The question of Abolition in India is likely to be the next solid piece of work to be undertaken by the British
Abolitionists. So far as we can foresee, abolition will not be so easily accomplished there as in some of the
Colonies, owing to the long-lasting and strongly-vested interest now involved in the system of vice Regulation
in India; for there are a certain number of Anglo-Indian officials who live, so to speak, by the system, just as
there were officials who lived by the system of the C. D. Acts in England. Its degrading effects in India have
been set forth to our public at home; it is necessary, however, in order to appreciate the full weight of
degradation and enslavement imposed upon Indian women by this system, to talk with natives of India on the
subject, especially those Indian gentlemen whose hearts are full of deep sorrow and concern for the women
of their own land. We have talked with such, and we can scarcely find words with which to express the ardent
wish to remove this injustice which fills their hearts and ours. Enlightened Indians have for a long time see
that a social reform in India must begin with the moral elevation of their women. So long as the women
remain uneducated, kept in complete seclusion and taught by the most fanatical and worst class of priests
that their degradation is a kind of fate, and that it is a sacred duty to submit to it, there can be little hope of
any real moral progress in India. * * *
What has England done in this matter? Its Government takes credit to itself for the abolition of
Suttee, >> note 1 and that was a great advance both actually and in the general estimation; . . .
Suttee, or the burning of Indian widows, has been abolished indeed, as shocking to the moral sense of
humanity; but the same Government which with one hand removed these evils, imposed with the other hand
the degrading, soul-and-body-murdering system of C. D. Ordinances. The yoke of this system fell upon
Indian women just at the time when the hope was arising in the breasts of some of their fellow-countrymen
that the period of emancipation from their degradation and thralldom was arriving. It fastened them down in
23
slavery, it doubled their chains, it stamped them with a deeper degradation than had ever been known before;
and although it may be said that only a certain per centage of women actually suffer under the system, yet we
know what a blight it is to the whole womanhood of the world when such a system is allowed to prevail, and
to work its deadening and corrupting fruits in the minds of men of all degrees, to sear the moral sense of the
whole community, and to render men almost blind to every idea of justice. The question is not difficult to
answer in regard to Indian women whether our government has done more harm than good.
Now at this period we are in England asking help in our abolition work of native Indian men. So far we can
scarcely ask the help of Indian women, for they have no freedom of action, though a few, thank God, are
already alive to this question. We have asked these gentlemen "What can you do to aid us in relieving you
in India of this immoral system?" In return they look at us sadly and say "We will do what we can; but you
must not stop there, but help us in return to do something for the moral education of our women." It seems to
me that mutual help is demanded, and that a mutual duty presses upon us and our Indian fellow-subjects. I
cannot feel it to be possible to work for Repeal in India without grappling more or less with the whole question
of the condition of Indian women. Our own responsibility as Christian women presses heavily upon my mind.
It has especially done so since I read a printed correspondence between some of these Indian Reformers
and certain of our own public men, such as Mr. W. E. Gladstone, >> note 2 Mr. Courtney, Professor Max
Mller, &c. A volume of this correspondence has been placed in my hands, and it is of the deepest
importance. The following passage from a letter of Professor Max Mller's to Mr. Malabari, >> note 3 in
October 1886, was brought before me at that date, and the perusal of the following sentence seemed to me
to be a call to the women of England, and I therefore now, in the pages of The Sentinel, desire to quote the
following, feeling sure that it will not be unfruitful in the minds of many readers: "Depend on it," says
Professor Max Mller, "justice will be done at last. Write a short pamphlet containing nothing but well-known
and well authenticated facts, and send it to the women of England. They begin to be a power, and they have
one splendid quality they are never beaten. If they once know what is going on in India, tolerated by the
English Government, they will tell every candidate for Parliament, 'Unless this blot is removed from the
escutcheon of England, you will not be re-elected.' Women at all events have courage, and when they see
what is hideous, they do not wait for orders from home before they say what they think. Secondly, educate
your own woman, and depend on it, this matter will soon be set right in spite of temporizing Governors, or
half-hearted reformers among your own countrymen. I know many of my native friends will be very angry with
me for writing this. I only wish I could speak to them face to face, and I should soon convince them that I care
more for the good name of the true Aryas >> note 4 than they themselves. You know I abstained for a long
time from writing on this subject. I felt it was in good hands, and I do not like, nor have I time, to give my
opinion on everything. But now that apparently you are beaten, I cannot remain silent." These words of
Professor Mller have been on my mind for some time as a kind of call to the Christian women in England, to
join with the Zenana >> note 5 work, already undertaken and largely supported by them, a more direct effort
to help the women of India out of that degraded position (it should not be forgotten that it is all the higher
castes of women who are thus degraded), into a position of greater freedom and light, which will enable them
to fight their own battles. I have had testimony lately from the homes of native Indian ladies, which convinces
me that a practical sympathy with them in their present condition, would go far to remove the prejudices
which they feel against Christianity. These prejudices are not always wisely dealt with by the earnest
Christian ladies, who find an entrance into the Zenana. Some practical suggestions on this subject will shortly
be published by a native Indian gentleman, who believes that the abolition of idol-worship, and the knowledge
of the true god, are hindered somewhat by the want of instruction and intelligent sympathy among
missionaries.
24
The Civilizing Mission

As we see in Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" (NAEL 8, 2.1794) and Joseph Conrad's Heart
of Darkness (NAEL 8, 2.1890), empire-building might involve the most ruthless exploitation of subject
peoples, and the imperialist might be violent, mercenary, selfish, short-sighted, or outright stupid. Yet Great
Britain often represented imperialism to itself in a highly idealized fashion. When the British took over a
territory, or so the argument went, they brought civilization to the barbarian, enlightenment to the heathen,
prosperity to the impoverished, law and social order to the brutish primitive. While most saw no reason to
apologize for forwarding British economic interests in the colonies, imperialist expansion found further
justification in Britain's self-appointed mission of spreading "civilization, commerce, and Christianity" across
the globe, in the words of the famous explorer and missionary David Livingstone.
Thomas Jones Barker, "The Secret of England's Greatness" (Queen Victoria presenting a Bible in the
Audience Chamber at Windsor), c. 1863.
Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden," written to inspire brother imperialists across the Atlantic, identifies
the civilizing mission as one to be undertaken by all right-minded people of European descent. But many
believed that the British were especially suited for the governing of an Empire by virtue of their national,
racial, and cultural superiority. In his lecture on "Imperial Duty," John Ruskin praises the English as "a race
mingled of the best northern blood" and enriched by "a thousand years of noble history." Given these
advantages, England has not just the right, but a mandate to expand: "she must found colonies as fast and
as far as she is able". Joseph Chamberlain's lecture "The True Conception of Empire" describes the English
as a "great governing race" whose greatness is manifested especially in the British "sense of obligation" to
the savage populations under its benevolent rule.
Chamberlain distinguishes the white "self-governing colonies" like Canada and Australia, identified as moreor-less equal partners within the Empire, from the "tropical" colonies in which indigenous populations greatly
outnumbered the white settlers. These populations were seen as backward, ignorant, and culturally and
spiritually bankrupt desperately in need of guidance from the superior white man. In his "Minute on Indian
Education," Thomas Babington Macaulay argues that India's cultural inferiority is so pronounced that Indians
should not be allowed to gain literacy in their own native languages. Macaulay hopes to form an anglicized
native ruling class, "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals,
and in intellect," that would serve as an intermediary between the British and the mass of colonial subjects. In
Kipling, by contrast, the gulf between colonizer and colonized remains seemingly unbridgeable: the "newcaught" subject races are "sullen," barbaric, and ungrateful, and the white man's civilizing mission is a stern
and thankless one.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, from "Minute on Indian Education" (1835)
The historian, essayist, and parliamentarian Thomas Babington Macaulay (18001859) served as a member
of the supreme council of the East India Company from 1834 to 1838, where he oversaw major educational
and legal reforms. The "Minute" was written as a rebuttal to those council members who believed that Indian
students should continue to be educated in Sanskrit and Arabic as well as English; Macaulay's party carried
the argument.
We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the
intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of
employing it?
Felice Beato, "British India, 1857." The Secundra Bagh palace courtyard, Lucknow, after the Indian Mutiny.
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part
of India contain neither Literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they
are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to
be admitted on all sides that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means
of pursuing higher studies can at present be effect only by means of some language not vernacular amongst
them.
What, then, shall that language be? One half of the Committee maintain that it should be the English. The
other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which
25
language is the best worth knowing?

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of
their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both
here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take
the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who
could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia. . . .
. . . It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand
highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and
Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But, when we pass from works of
imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the
Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical
information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than
what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. In every rank of
physical or moral philosophy the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.
How, then, stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of
their mother-tongue. We much teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is
hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands preeminent even among the languages of the West. . . . Whoever
knows that language, has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the
earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature
now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was
extant in all the languages of the world spoken together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language
spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to
become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European
communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are
every year becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look
at the intrinsic value of our literature or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest
reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our
native subjects. . . .
. . . It is said that the Sanscrit and Arabic are the language in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of
people are written, and that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the
duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on the religious question. But to
encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value only because that literature
inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with
reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved.
It is confessed that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are told to teach it because it is fruitful of
monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find
them in company with a false religion. . . .
. . .In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel, with them, that it
is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present
do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of
persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class
we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science
borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying
knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" (1899)
Rudyard Kipling (NAEL 8, 2.1793) wrote this poem just after Admiral Dewey's victory at Manila, which
consolidated United States control over the Philippines. Kipling reminds the Americans of the imperial duties
that all "white men" share, whatever their nationality.
26
Text of poem.
1.
In his 1878 essay "England's Mission," the politician William Gladstone claimed that imperialism was a
constant though perhaps unconscious topic of interest to all Victorians: "The sentiment of empire may be
called innate in every Briton. If there are exceptions, they are like those of men born blind or lame among us.
It is part of our patrimony: born with our birth, dying only with our death; incorporating itself in the first
elements of our knowledge, and interwoven with all our habits of mental action upon public affairs." Choose
three Victorian selections from NAEL that do not overtly discuss imperialism and show how we may find the
"sentiment of empire" hidden within the text and "interwoven" with other concerns.
2.
Nineteenth-century European and American imperialists argued that they had both a right and a duty
to rule people of non-European descent.
a.
How does Rudyard Kipling articulate this argument in "The White Man's Burden"? For
instance, how does he characterize the white man and the people he is to subjugate?
b.
John Ruskin's "Imperial Duty" and Joseph Chamberlain's "The True Conception of
Empire" are more concerned with British imperial rights and duties than the "white man's burden" in general.
Compare their nationalist argument to Kipling's racial one. What assumptions about national and racial
identity do they share? Both "Imperial Duty" and "The True Conception of Empire" are far more idealistic in
tone than Kipling's poem. What different rhetorical strategies are at work in the three texts, and what goals do
they share in common?
c.
Compare Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Minute on Indian Education," which focuses on the
cultural superiority of the British, to Benjamin Kidd's The Control of the Tropics, which describes European
evolutionary superiority. How is Kidd's argument about biology also an argument about culture?
3.
Critics of British imperialism challenge its enabling ideology by arguing that imperial expansion is
neither animated by unselfish and benevolent aims, nor has it effected improvement of non-European
cultures.
a.
In "The Political Significance of Imperialism," John Atkinson Hobson asserts that the British
govern "huge aggregations of lower races in all parts of the world by methods which are antithetic to the
methods of government which we most value for ourselves" (NAEL 8, 2.1634). What are those political
ideals, and how does Hobson show that British colonial governance has violated them?
b.
According to J. J. Thomas's Froudacity, how has European imperialism interrupted the

development and destroyed the prosperity of African cultures? What vision of progress does Thomas offer in
contrast to those proposed by Joseph Chamberlain orBenjamin Kidd?
c.
What are some of the darker motives that inspire the would-be imperialist in Kipling's "The
Man Who Would Be King" (NAEL 8, 2.17941818) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (NAEL 8,
2.18901947)? How do you account for the contradictory character of Kurtz, who is simultaneously greedy
27
and idealistic?
4.
In Heart of Darkness, Marlow comments that more often than not, imperialism is "just robbery with
violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale. . . . What redeems it is the idea only" (NAEL 8, 2.1894).
a.
Compare Joseph Chamberlain's assertion that violence is an unfortunate but necessary

component of the "work of civilization" undertaken by the imperialist.
b.
Marlow goes on to describe the redemptive idea as "something you can set up, and bow
down before, and offer a sacrifice to" (NAEL 8, 2.1894). Is he being ironic? Is Conrad being ironic at Marlow's
expense?
c.
What are some of the "eloquent" and "noble" ideas that motivate Kurtz's work in Africa, as set
forth in his pamphlet for the "International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs" (NAEL 8, 2.1926)
and elsewhere? Compare Kurtz's ideas with those found in Chamberlain, Thomas Babington Macaulay,
and Benjamin Kidd.
5.
The Victorian human sciences purported objectively to prove the biological and cultural superiority of
Europeans, and the inferiority of colonized peoples.
a.
According to Victorian anthropologists and social evolutionists, the criteria determining a

civilized state were quantifiable, uniform, and universal. However, Edward Tylor does not establish these in a
scientific way, instead simply noting that the "educated world of Europe and America practically sets a
standard by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and savage tribes at the other,
arranging the rest of mankind between those limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or
to cultured life." Can you find other instances in Tylor or in Benjamin Kidd in which scientific argument
proceeds by means of prejudice, convention, or unexamined assumptions?
b.
Compare Kidd's argument that tropical climates have impeded the evolutionary progress of
their indigenous inhabitants to J. J. Thomas's assertion that the rigors of the African climate are proof of the
African's "soundness and nobility." In what other ways does Thomas challenge British representations of
Africa and Africans?
6.
Among their many other tasks, postcolonial writers look critically at imperialism and its history and
seek to undo the ideologies that underpin and justify imperialist practices.
a.
What psychological profiles of the imperialist is presented by J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the
Barbarians (NAEL 8, 2.283948)? Are the motives of Coetzee's imperialist consistent with those professed or
described by the Victorian writers in this web topic? How do the narrator and Colonel Joll characterize the
captive aborigines under their charge?
The selection from E. M. Forster's A Passage to India describes the occupation of British India from the
Indian perspective. What do Dr. Aziz, Mahmoud Ali, and Hamidullah think of the British "sahibs"? How might
they respond to the essays by Thomas Babington Macaulayand Joseph Chamberlain?
28
Global war is one of the defining features of twentieth-century experience, and the first global war is the
subject of one of this periods topics, Representing the Great War. Masses of dead bodies strewn upon the
ground, plumes of poison gas drifting through the air, hundreds of miles of trenches infested with ratsthese
are but some of the indelible images that have come to be associated with World War I (1914-18). It was a
war that unleashed death, loss, and suffering on an unprecedented scale. How did recruiting posters,
paintings, memoirs, and memorials represent the war? Was it a heroic occasion, comparable to a sporting
event, eliciting displays of manly valor and courage? Or was it an ignominious waste of human life, with little
gain to show on either side of the conflict, deserving bitterly ironic treatment? What were the differences
between how civilians and soldiers, men and women, painters and poets represented the war? How effective
or inadequate were memorials, poems, or memoirs in conveying the enormous scale and horror of the war?
These are among the issues explored in this topic about the challenge to writers and artists of representing
the unrepresentable.
Another of the twentieth centurys defining features is radical artistic experiment.
The boundary-breaking art, literature, and music of the first decades of the
century are the subject of the topic Modernist Experiment. Among the leading
aesthetic innovators of this era were the composer Igor Stravinsky, the cubist
Pablo Picasso, and the futurist F. T. Marinetti. The waves of artistic energy in the
avant-garde European arts soon crossed the English Channel, as instanced by
the abstraction and dynamism of Red Stone Dancer (1913-14) by the Londonbasedvorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Other vorticists and modernists
include such English-language writers as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and
Mina Loy, who also responded to the stimulus and challenge of the European
avant-garde with manifestos, poems, plays, and other writings. This topic
explores the links between Continental experiment and the modernist
innovations of English-language poets and writers during a period of
extraordinary ferment in literature and the arts.
Another of the defining features of the twentieth
century was the emergence of new nations out of
European colonial rule. Among these nations,
Ireland was the oldest of Britains colonies and the
first in modern times to fight for independence. The
topic Imagining Ireland explores how twentiethcentury Irish writers fashioned new ideas about the
Irish nation. It focuses on two periods of crisis,
when the violent struggle for independence put the
greatest pressure on literary attempts to imagine the nation: in the aftermath of
the Easter Rising of 1916 and the later outbreaks of sectarian violence from
1969 (known as the Troubles) in Northern Ireland. How do poems, plays,
memoirs, short stories, and other literary works represent the bloodshed and yet
the potential benefits of these violent political upheavals? Do they honor or lament, idealize or criticize, these
political acts? And how do these literary representations compare with political speeches and treaties that
bear on these defining moments in modern Irish history? Imagining Ireland considers these and other
questions about literature and the making of Irish nationality, which continue to preoccupy contemporary
writers of Ireland, Northern
Ireland, and the Irish diaspora.
Today we know it as World War I, but those who lived through

predicted to last only a few months and to result in a resoundi
But as the years passed and the casualties mounted into the
quite different from its predecessors. With nearly nine million s
and survivors afflicted with prolonged physical and mental suf
course of military and political history. It also represented a ch
the enormity of the death toll and the futility of trench warfare.
saturated trenches fired machine-guns at unseen soldiers in o
into no-mans-land, they became completely vulnerable. The u
challenge of representing something so new and awful, so va
29
Once it became clear that both sides had settled into their trenches, which stretched from Switzerland to the
North Sea, people naturally wondered what had gone wrong. Patriotic poems and songs from previous wars,
such as Henry Newbolts Vita Lampada (1897-98), linked the British soldiers fighting prowess with his
moral superiority, fairness, and skill. World War I also elicited representations that blurred the line between
war and athletics, such as Jessie Popes jingoistic poem The Call (1915) and the recruiting poster The
Army Isnt All Work. But as soldiers expectations of a just, valorous, sporting war gave way to hideous,
anonymous carnage, characteristic expressions of irony emerged. For soldier poets such as Siegfried
Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, irony proved a useful means of representing the gulf between expectation and
reality, the murderous war and the unsuspecting nation, the soldiers comrades in the trenches and the
unseen enemy across no-mans-land. Bitterly ironic statements such as Siegfried Sassoons A Soldiers
Declaration helped call attention to the rage and bewilderment of the trench soldier; but their chilly reception
by an equally bewildered reading public reinforced cultural divisions. Some readers at home condemned the
war poets attacks as unpatriotic, and opinion remained divided between those who had fought and knew, and
those who preferred not to know.
Some poets also disliked the soldier poets graphic and caustically ironic
depictions of the war. In the words of W. B. Yeats in his 1936 preface to The
Oxford Book of Modern Verse, the bitterness of war poets was an
unconstructive passive suffering. Yeats refused to include in his anthology
combatant poets such as Owen and Sassoon. He preferred in poetry a more
active heroism, such as that he invented for the speaker of An Irish Airman
Foresees His Death.
As casualties from both the Allied and Central Powers ran into the millions,
military tactics became increasingly desperate. These included the deployment
of mustard gas, submarine attacks on shipping lines, and howitzer shelling and
zeppelin bombings of cities miles behind the front lines. Such tactics signaled a
breakdown of the rules of warfare in favor of indiscriminate killing of both the
soldiers and the civilians they protected. Civilian artists now found they had an
authentic, lived experience of war they could express. The involvement of
millions of women in the war effort, such as those depicted in the poster We Need you, Redcross, eroded
the distinction between civilian women and the men who went off to save the country. Munitions, factory, and
textile jobs were vacated by enlistees and quickly filled by women for whom the war represented an
economic opportunity. Although recruiting posters such as Women of Britain sayGO! associated women
with the English countryside that valiant soldiers ought to defend, poems such as Jessie Popes War Girls
represent women as empowered by the challenge of their wartime jobs. Frustrated by the wars length and
carnage, some poets, such as Sassoon and Ezra Pound, allude disparagingly to the women and the
civilization soldiers were supposedly protecting. Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, for example, refers to
Britain as an old bitch
gone in the teeth.
Because of its massive
scale and controversial
impetus, monuments to the
war often indicate the
difficulty of representing it.
Commemorative
physical structures tend to
look like a mixture of
massiveness and strippeddown, minimalist
gestures, as if trying to
speak volumes and
remain silent at the same
time. The Menin Gate
and the Cenotaph of
Whitehall both stand in
mute remembrance of a
massive loss that can
barely be imagined, much
less represented. The
spareness of the
Cenotaph, meanwhile,
allowed two
contemporaries to draw
different conclusions about its significance: Henry Mortons Heart of
London records his impression of the monument as a symbol of unity and communal reverence, while
Charlotte Mew cannot help but notice, in her poem Cenotaph, how incongruous this great static symbol of
grief appears in the middle of a degraded mercantile hub. Like the divergences between jingoists and
satirists, soldiers and civilians, feminists and antifeminists, these differences over war memorials reflect
competing views over how to represent a war that ultimately defies
representation.
30
Sir Henry Newbolt, Vita Lampada (1897-98)

Sir Henry Newbolt, a childhood friend of Douglas Haig (later to command World War Is British Expeditionary Force),
wrote the following poem, which became popular early in World War I, in the late nineteenth century. Its equation of
warfare with cricket, of valor with sportsmanship, represented an ideal of rugged bravery and an expectation that wars
could follow game rules that many British soldiers and generals followed. These expectations proved completely
inadequate to the realities of trench warfare. The poems title, which means The Torch of Life, is taken from the Latin
poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius, where it refers to a torch handed off in a relay race.
Theres a breathless hush in the Close to-night

Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And its not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a seasons fame,
But his Captains hand on his shoulder smote
Play up! play up! and play the game!'
The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatlings jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And Englands far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind
Jessie Pope, The Call (1915)
The following poem is perhaps the best-known example of Jessie Popes jingoistic war poems, exhorting young men to
enlist and save England, or be labeled cowards. Her reputation was such that Wilfred Owen originally entitled Dulce et
Decorum Est as To Jessie Pope.
Whos for the trench

Are you, my laddie?
Wholl follow French
Will you, my laddie?
Whos fretting to begin,
Whos going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin
Do you, my laddie?
Whos for the khaki suit
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot
31
Do you, my laddie?
Whos keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And whod rather wait a bit
Would you, my laddie?
Wholl earn the Empires thanks
Wholl swell the victors ranks
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums
Wholl stand and bite his thumbs
Jessie Pope, War Girls (1916)
Like her poem The Call, Jessie Popes War Girls gives voice to jingoistic patriotism. But the language and action of
the poem also revel in the opportunities for empowerment that the war has created for women: they are no longer
caged and penned up, but tackling jobs with energy and knack.
Theres the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
Theres the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
Strong, sensible, and fit,
Theyre out to show their grit,
And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
No longer caged and penned up,
Theyre going to keep their end up
Till the khaki boys come marching back.
Theres the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
Theres the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
Theres the girl who cries All fares, please! like a man,
And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
Beneath each uniform
Beats a heart thats soft and warm,
Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
But a solemn statement this is,
Theyve no time for love and kisses
Till the khaki soldier boys come marching home.
W. B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
The Irish airman in this poem is Major Robert Gregory (1881-1918), only child of Yeatss friend Lady Augusta Gregory.
He was killed on the Italian front. In elegizing him, Yeats focuses on the lonely impulse of delight that drove him to
enlist in the British Royal Flying Corps and distinguishes his heroic solitude from patriotic duty and other common
motivations.
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartans poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balance all, brought all to mind,
32
The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
W. B. Yeats, from Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)

In 1936, as editor of a leading poetry anthology, Yeats made the controversial choice of excluding all of the World War I
combatant poets, even though he had set himself the goal of including all good poets who have lived or died from
three years before the death of Tennyson [1889] to the present moment. The following is his explanation.
XV
I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all the anthologies, but I have
substituted Herbert Reads End of a Warwritten long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of
exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military
Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joyfor all skill is joyfulbut felt bound, in the words
of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the
first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold
withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies,
tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver
at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The
Persians,Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the roadthat is all.
If the war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of
fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more
painful disease. Florence Farr returning third class from Ireland found herself among Connaught Rangers just returned
from the Boer War who described an incident over and over, and always with loud laughter: an unpopular sergeant
struck by a shell turned round and round like a dancer wound in his own entrails. That too may be a right way of seeing
war, if war is necessary; the way of the Cockney slums, of Patrick Street, of theKilmainham Minut, of Johnny I hardly
knew ye, of the medieval Dance of Death.
W. B. Yeats, from Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)
In 1936, as editor of a leading poetry anthology, Yeats made the controversial choice of excluding all of the World War I
combatant poets, even though he had set himself the goal of including all good poets who have lived or died from
three years before the death of Tennyson [1889] to the present moment. The following is his explanation.
XV
I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all the anthologies, but I have
substituted Herbert Reads End of a Warwritten long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of
exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military
Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joyfor all skill is joyfulbut felt bound, in the words
of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the
first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold
withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies,
tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver
at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The
Persians,Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the roadthat is all.
If the war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of
fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more
painful disease. Florence Farr returning third class from Ireland found herself among Connaught Rangers just returned
from the Boer War who described an incident over and over, and always with loud laughter: an unpopular sergeant
struck by a shell turned round and round like a dancer wound in his own entrails. That too may be a right way of seeing
war, if war is necessary; the way of the Cockney slums, of Patrick Street, of theKilmainham Minut, of Johnny I hardly
knew ye, of the medieval Dance of Death.
33
Siegfried Sassoon, Finished with the War: A Soldiers Declaration

Siegfried Sassoons declaration of war against the war appeared in theBradford Pioneer on July 27, 1917. In disgust
with the war, he threw the ribbon of his Military Cross into the sea. Thanks to the help of his friend Robert Graves,
Sassoon was declared to have shell shock instead of being court-martialed. The British army placed him in a hospital
at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, for the duration of the war.
(This statement was made to his commanding officer by Second-Lieutenant S. L. Sassoon, Military Cross,
recommended for D.S.O., Third Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, as explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further
in the army. He enlisted on 3rd August 1914, showed distinguished valour in France, was badly wounded, and would
have been kept on home service if he had stayed in the army.)
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being
deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of
defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and
my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change
them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for
ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insecurities for which the fighting
men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them;
also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the
continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
July, 1917.
S. Sassoon.
Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920, 1921)

During World War I, Ezra Pound was an American migr in London and the impresario behind imagism and vorticism
in England. After many of his friends were killed in the trenches, including the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme and the
sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, he described his postwar activities in the following terms: 1918 began investigation of
causes of war, to oppose same. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, from which the following two excerpts are taken, is one
result of Pounds war-guilt investigations.
IV
These fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case. . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old mens lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
34
home to many deceits,

home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
Fortitude as never before
Frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earths lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Charlotte Mew, The Cenotaph (September 1919)
Charlotte Mew supported herself during World War I by publishing poems and stories in London periodicals. The
following poem appeared shortly after the unveiling of the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
Not yet will those measureless fields be green again

Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more
slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the columns head.
And over the stairway, at the footoh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel, with the small, sweet, tinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs,
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
To loversto mothers
Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead
For this will stand in our Marketplace
Wholl sell, wholl buy
(Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whores and hucksters face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.
H. V. Morton, from The Heart of London (1925)
35
Henry Morton began work as a journalist and descriptive writer of vignettes for the Daily Express after reporting the
discovery of Egyptian king Tutankhamens tomb in the 1920s. The following passage displays several of Mortons
impressions of the Cenotaph.
The Cenotaph
TEN-THIRTY A.M. in Whitehall on a cold, grey February morning.
There is expectancy at the Horse Guards, where two living statues draped in scarlet cloaks sit their patient chargers. A
group of sightseers waits at the gate for the high note of a silver cavalry trumpet, for the click of hoofs on the cobbles
and a shining cavalcade beneath an arch: the pageantry that precedes that silent ceremony of changing a guard that
turns out for no man but the King.
Laden omnibuses go down to Westminster or up to Charing Cross, and, as they pass, every passenger looks at the
two Life Guards in their scarlet glory, for they are one of the sights of London that never grows stale. Taxicabs and
limousines spin smoothly left and right, men and women enter and leave Government offices: a Whitehall morning is
moving easily, leisurely, elegantly, if you like, towards noon.
And I walk on to Westminster, and, in the centre of the road, cream-coloured, dominant, stands the Cenotaph.
*
More than six years ago the last shot was fired. Six years. It is long enough for a heart to become convalescent. Sharp
agonies which at the time of their happening seem incapable of healing have a merciful habit of mending in six years. A
broken love-affair that turned the world into a pointless waste of Time has ended in a happy marriage of six years. A
death that left so much unspoken, so much regret, so much to atone for, falls in six years into its pathetic perspective a
little nearer Nineveh and Tyre.
I look up at the Cenotaph. A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle van takes off his worn cap. An omnibus goes by. The
men lift their hats. Men passing with papers and documents under their arms, attache and despatch cases in their
handsall the business of lifebare their heads as they hurry by.
Six years have made no difference here. The Cenotaphthat mass of national emotion frozen in stoneis holy to this
generation. Although I have seen it so many times on that day once a year when it comes alive to an accompaniment
of pomp as simple and as beautiful as church ritual, I think that I like it best just standing here in a grey morning, with
its feet in flowers and ordinary folk going by, remembering.
*
Westminster Abbey 1920
I look up to Charing Cross and down to Westminster. On one side Whitehall narrows to a slit, against which rises the
thin, black pencil of the Nelson column; on the other Westminster Abbey, grey and devoid of detail, seems etched in
smoke against the sky, rising up like a mirage from the silhouette of bare trees.
The wind comes down Whitehall and pulls the flags, exposing a little more of their red, white, and blue, as if invisible
fingers were playing with them. The plinth is vacant. The constant changing trickle of a crowd that later in the day will
stand here for a few moments has not arrived. There is no one here.
No one? I look, but not with my eyes, and I see that the Empire is here: England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India . . . herespringing in glory from our London soil.
*
In a dream I see those old mad days ten years ago. How the wind fingers the flags. . . .
I remember how, only a few weeks ago, as a train thundered through France, a woman sitting opposite to me in the
dining car said, The English! I looked through the window over the green fields, and saw row on row, sharply white
against the green, rising with the hill and dropping again into the hollowskeeping a firm line as they had been taught
to doa battalion on its last parade.
36
The Cenotaph and no one there? That can never be.

*
War Office 1922
Look! Near the mottled white and black of the War Office far up Whitehall a platoon of Guardsmen come marching.
They swing their arms and stride out, carrying their rifles at a perfect slope. They are young, the eighteen-year-olds
we used to call them in 1918 when they were called up to form the young soldiers battalions. I remember how
frightened some of them were at this thing that had happened to them, and how often, when one was orderly officer
padding round at night, a boy soldier would be crying like a child in the darkness at some harshness, or, in a wave of
homesickness.
The old recipe has worked with the Guards! On they come, a platoon of tough Irish soldiers, their solemn faces grim
and set under their peaked caps, their belts snow white with pipeclay.
They approach the Cenotaph:
Platoon! roars the sergeant. Eyesright!
He slaps his rifle butt, and the heads swing round.
Eyesfront!
*
The Cenotaph stands there with a wind pulling . . . pulling like fingers touching the Flag.
1.
War has often been described in metaphors drawn from games, and during World War I British troops
sometimes even kicked a ball to the opposing side as they launched an attack. But for many World War I
soldiers, these metaphors seemed to distort the futility, anonymity, and mass death of modern combat.
Compare the view of war as sporting event in Henry Newbolts Vita Lampada, Jessie Popes The Call,
and the recruiting poster The Army Isnt All Work with the skeptical critique of such representations in
Wilfred Owens poem Disabled (NAEL 8, 2.1977).
2.
Recruiting posters represented the war as public duty and patriotic defense, as does a poem such as
Jessie Popes The Call. But compare Popes poem and World War I recruiting posters with Wilfred Owens
poems Dulce Et Decorum Est (NAEL 8, 2.1974), which addresses Pope toward its end, and Disabled
(NAEL 8, 2. 1977), which echoes in its last lines a 1914 recruiting poster that asked, Will they never come?
3.
In his preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and in his poem An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death, Yeats represents war as potentially heroic and ennobling. Contrast this view of war with depictions of
the wars fruitless waste and suffering in Siegfried Sassoons A Soldiers Declaration and Wilfred Owens
S.I.W. (NAEL 8, 2.1976). How do you explain these differences?
4.
The Great War offered many new job opportunities for women that had long been denied them.
According to Jessie Popes poem War Girls and the recruiting poster We Need You, Redcross, what forms
of empowerment does the war afford women? Contrast the role women play in these works with the
association of women with the defended nation in the poster Women of Britain sayGO! and Siegfried
Sassoons Glory of Women (NAEL 8, 2.1962).
5.
Artists, photographers, and writers attempted to convey the horror of trench warfare. Compare the
trenches as seen in this topics paintings and photographs. What are the advantages and limitations of each
medium? Compare, in turn, these visual representations of the trenches with a poem, such as Rosenbergs
Break of Day in the Trenches (NAEL 8, 2.1967), Sassoons The Rear-Guard (NAEL 8, 2.1961), or Owens
Strange Meeting (NAEL 8, 2.197576). What can the written work convey that the visual representation
cannot, and vice-versa?
6.
Modernism is the term many scholars now give to the artistic movement dominant from just before
World War I to the outbreak of World War II.
1.
Compare the pre-war Imagist poems of H. D., T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound to the war poetry
37
of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon. What differences do you notice in form and
content? How would you explain these differences?
2.
To what extent can we see the impact of the war and its aftermath in modernist works such
as T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, especially sections I and III, or Ezra Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in
particular parts IV and V?
b. The war as seen on the home front and on the battlefront was quite different. What contrasts can you find
between how the war is represented by soldiers and by civilians? Concentrate on one or two of the soldiers in
theNAEL section Voices from World War I, such as Owen, Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, and
David Jones, and one or two of the civilians who wrote about the war, such as May Wedderburn Cannan,
Pope, Charlotte Mew, Yeats, or Pound. How might you also complicate these distinctions?
c. Once the scale of the Great Wars casualties became clear, many writers sought to assign blame for the
tremendous loss of life. They attributed responsibility for the war to politicians, religious authorities, fathers,
women, and a bankrupt civilization. Examine who is blamed for the war and why, in various works, including
Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Sassoons They (NAEL 8, 2.1960) and Glory of Women (NAEL 8,
2.1962), and Owens Dulce Et Decorum Est (NAEL 8, 2.1974) and S.I.W. (NAEL 8, 2.1976). How do these
works attack, ironize, question, or taunt the people and institutions seen as guilty for the war?
d. Public memorials and national monuments serve as focal points of public mourning, and often create
controversy both because of what they represent and what they omit. The Whitehall Cenotaph in London was
designed by Sir Edward Lutyens in 1919 as a simple, temporary structure, but when public demand proved
overwhelming, it was recast in Portland marble and made permanent in 1920. Cenotaph means empty
tomb, and Remembrance Day in England is still celebrated around the Whitehall Cenotaph. Over time, this
official monument has come to symbolize all those who died during the war, not just those whose bodies
were never identified.
a.
Read Charlotte Mews poem Cenotaph and Henry Mortons journalistic account. In what
ways do these two texts differ in their attempts to represent the memorial and to interpret its significance?
b.
Like literary texts, public monuments provide meaning for events, and they create cultural
memories that may or may not be accurate historical representations. Compare the illustrations of the
cenotaph with the pictures of the Menin Gate, which is located near the cemeteries for the Battle of
Passchendaele and bears the names of over 54,000 British soldiers killed in trenches nearby. What does
each monument represent and how does it do so? Also compare Sassoons poem On Passing the New
Menin Gate (NAEL 8, 2.1963). What differences do you see between the memories created by the Menin
Gate, the cenotaph, and Sassoons poem?
2.
Women writers represented the war in ways that were sometimes jingoistic and patriotic, sometimes
conflicted and discordant.
a.
Reread the last six lines of Charlotte Mews Cenotaph and consider how Mews poem ends
with a series of discordant images. Describe the poems tone and its effect on Mews representation of the
cenotaph. Contrast Mews poem with Popes The Call.
How and why are women blamed for the war in poems such as Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and
Sassoons Glory of Women (NAEL 8, 2.1962)?
The early part of the twentieth century saw massive changes in the everyday life of people in cities. The
recent inventions of the automobile, airplane, and telephone shrank distances around the world and sped up
the pace of life. Freuds theory of the unconscious and infantile sexuality radically altered the popular
understanding of the mind and identity, and the late-nineteenth-century thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich
Nietzsche in different ways undermined traditional notions of truth, certainty, and morality. Theoretical
science, meanwhile, was rapidly shifting from two-hundred-year-old Newtonian models to Einsteins theory of
relativity and finally to quantum mechanics.
At least partly in response to this acceleration of life and thought, a wave of aggressively experimental
movements, sometimes collectively termed modernist because of their emphasis on radical innovation,
swept through Europe. In Paris, the Spanish expatriate painter Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges
38
39
40
41
42
43
Mina Loy, Brancusis Golden Bird

The English-born poet and artist Mina Loy became involved with nearly every important avant-garde movement of the
early part of the twentieth centuryfrom surrealism and Dada to futurismas she moved between the metropolitan
centers of London, Paris, Florence, and New York. In the following poem, she describes a work by Constantin
Brancusi, the Romanian-born French sculptor who was one of the pioneers of abstract art. The poem was published
facing a picture of Brancusis sculpture in the same issue of the literary journal The Dial that also published T. S.
Eliots The Waste Land.
Brancusis Golden Bird1

The toy
become the aesthetic archetype
As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed 5
the Alpha and Omega2
of Form
into a lump of metal
A naked orientation
unwinged unplumed 10
the ultimate rhythm
has lopped the extremities
of crest and claw
from
the nucleus of flight 15
The absolute act
of art
conformed
to continent sculpture
bare as the brow of Osiris3 20
this breast of revelation
an incandescent curve
licked by chromatic flames
in labyrinths of reflections
This gong 25
of polished hyperaesthesia4
shrills with brass
as the aggressive light
strikes
its significance 30
The immaculate
conception5
of the inaudible bird
occurs
in gorgeous reticence . .
1. Constantin Brancusi (18761957), French
(Romanian-born) pioneer of abstract sculpture,
whose bird statues became icons of modernism in
the arts. His nonrepresentational aesthetic was so
revolutionary at the time that U.S. customs officials
wanted to tax his sculptures as raw material
rather than works of art.
2. The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.
In the book of Revelation, Jesus repeatedly identifies
himself as the alpha and the omega.
3. God of the Egyptian underworld; symbol of the
indestructibility of life.
4. Excessive sensitivity.
5. Catholic doctrine that, from the moment of her
conception, Mary was free of the burden of original
44
45
Easter 1916 to the Troubles

Europes former colonies struggled often violently for political sovereignty as nation-states. Ireland, Britains
oldest former colony, was one of the first to fight for its independence in the first half of the twentieth century.
In addition to the creation of a new government, Irelands struggle for independence entailed creating new
ideas about Irish national identity through literature and the arts. This Norton Online Topic explores how
twentieth-century Irish writers attempted to re-imagine Ireland, particularly during two periods of crisis: in the
aftermath of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 and the later outbreaks of sectarian violence from 1969 (known as
the Troubles) in Northern Ireland.
The 1916 Easter Rising grew out of Irish political and cultural
nationalism and the desire for political sovereignty in Ireland. The
growing resentment over the British control of Ireland led a secret
revolutionary group known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) to
plan to take over Dublin on Easter
Sunday, April 23, 1916.
On the day after Easter, Monday,
April 24, 1916, a group of Irish
leaders (including Thomas Clarke, Padraic Pearse, Thomas
MacDonagh, and James Connolly) and about 1,600 Irish rebels, both
men and women, took over several buildings and streets in the center
of Dublin. On the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin, Pearse
issued a Proclamation of Irelands independence from British rule,
announcing the birth of the Republic of Ireland and the institution of
a provisional government. Five days later, with much of Dublins citycenter in ruins and aflame, the leaders were forced to surrender to a much larger British military force. In the
ensuing weeks, fifteen of the leaders of the Easter Rising were executed by firing squad. At the time of the
Easter Rising many Irish people were skeptical of the rebels efforts to force the British Empire from Ireland.
But after the swift execution and mass imprisonment of the Irish rebels, the public became more fervently
nationalist, opposing the British presence in Ireland. As a result, the leaders of the Rising became martyrs
within the public imagination.
The Easter Rising challenged modern Irish writers to re-imagine the
Irish nation and national identity. Irish writers criticized the tyranny of
British colonialism and shared the hope for an independent Ireland. Yet
they also depicted the dangers of Irish nationalism, including its
connections with armed violence, with cultural exclusion and racism,
and, especially, with the ethic of blood sacrifice. In different ways, both
W. B. Yeatss poem Easter, 1916 and Sean OCaseys play The
Plough and the Stars ask skeptical questions about a violent Irish
nationalism, even as they imagine an Ireland free from colonial rule.
Many Irish writers have figured the Irish nation as a woman to be fought for, as in the Easter 1916
Proclamation: Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom. Since the
rise of feminism in the 1960s, contemporary Irish women writers such as Eavan Boland (NAEL) have
attempted to revise this image of Ireland as womanboth to bear witness to real Irish womens oppression
and to criticize how the long history of British colonialism has limited Irish conceptions of gender and
nationality.
Though Ireland gained national independence in 1922, the island of Ireland is not politically united. The
twenty-six counties that comprise most of the island form the Republic of Ireland; the largely Catholic
Republic (called only Ireland) is fully independent from British rule. The six counties forming Northern
Ireland are still under British control, and they constitute a separate political entity. Northern Ireland is also
religiously divided between a Roman Catholic minority and an Ulster Protestant majority, and Ulster
Protestants have historically had more political and economic power
than Northern Irish Catholics. The combination of political and
economic inequality and religious differences between these two
groups has contributed to the waves of political and sectarian violence,
or Troubles, since the late 1960s.
The Troubles began when civil rights marches by Northern Irish
Catholics for equal housing, voting, and economic rights were forcibly
broken up by the Northern Irish police, or Royal Ulster Constabulary.
On Sunday, January 30, 1972, during a demonstration against the
unlawful imprisonment of Catholics, British soldiers fatally shot thirteen
46
unarmed demonstrators and wounded another fourteen. Bloody Sunday inflamed Northern Irish Catholics
and led in the 1970s and 80s to increased armed conflict between Catholic and Protestant paramilitary
groups, frequent bombings, the deployment of more British troops and tanks to the streets of Northern
Ireland, and the illegal internment of Catholics suspected of paramilitary ties. By the 1990s, however, political
leaders from both sides (including Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and John Hume of the Social Democratic and
Labour Party) began a series of talks to end the conflict in Northern Ireland. With the help of other Northern
Irish leaders, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and U.S. President Bill Clinton, these talks culminated in the
Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. This document effectively gives Northern Irish people the power to
implement and run their owngovernment apart from Westminster, London. The following month, the people of
Ireland and Northern Ireland overwhelmingly passed by referendum the Good Friday Agreement. Despite the
passing of the Agreement and the IRA announcement of a ceasefire in 1994, the political climate in Northern
Ireland remains tense.
Like earlier modern Irish writers,
contemporary Northern Irish
writers have also felt compelled to
respond to the Troubles in order
to re-imagine Northern Ireland.
The frequency and intensity of the
Troubles have placed new
pressures and raised new
questions for Northern Irish writers. How, for instance, can a Northern Irish writer illustrate the disturbing
nature of political violence without sensationalizing it? Can literature effectively offer consolation in the face of
such atrocities? How can national unity and inclusiveness be imagined amidst ongoing cultural, political, and
religious divisions? In works that range from elegy to farce, these are among the questions grappled with by
writers of different political and religious communities, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael
Longley, Fiona Barr, and a London-born writer of Irish parentage, Martin McDonagh.
The bloody events of the 1916 Easter Rising and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, both historical outgrowths
of British colonialism, have had a lasting impact on how Irish and Northern Irish writers imagine the nation.
Irish writers such as Yeats, James Joyce, and OCasey were among the centurys earliest postcolonial
subjects to forge, question, and critique the meaning of the Irish nation and national identity. Yeats and Joyce
have influenced postcolonial writers from countries that gained independence later in the century, such as
Salman Rushdie (India), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), and Chinua Achebe (Nigeria). Contemporary Irish,
Northern Irish, and Irish diaspora writers such as Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, Boland, Barr, and McDonagh
continue to make sense of the still-present history of British colonialism, the fact and meaning of sectarian
and political violence, and they sometimes even glimpse hope for peace and reconciliation.
Easter 1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic

In 1916, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunners of the Irish Republican Army) decided
they would wait no longer for long-delayed British legislation to grant Ireland Home Rule. A force of about
1,600 rebels mounted what would come to be known as the Easter Rising. They took over key buildings,
centered on the General Post Office on OConnell Street, Dublin. On Easter Monday, Padraic Pearse, head of
a Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, read from the steps of the General Post Office the following
proclamation that he and his colleagues had written.
The proclamation, a revolutionary political document for its time, announces the birth of a sovereign, selfdetermined Irish Republic based on the ideals of liberty and equality for all Irish people, both men and
women. It also invokes the rebel-leaders ethic of blood sacrifice.
ANONYMOUS
Easter 1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic
Poblacht Na h-Eireann
The Provisional Government
of the
Irish Republic
To the People of Ireland
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives
47
her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her ag and strikes for her
freedom.
Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionaryorganisation, the Irish
Republican Brotherhood, and through her open militaryorganisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish
Citizen Army, having patientlyperfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to
revealitself, she now seizes that moment, and supported by her exiled children inAmerica and by gallant
allies in Europe, >> note 1but relying in the rst on her ownstrength, she strikes in full condence of victory.
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and tothe unfettered control of Irish
destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. Thelong usurpation of that right by a foreign people and
government has notextinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destructionof the
Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their rightto national freedom and
sovereignty; six times during the past three hundredyears they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that
fundamental right andagain asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the IrishRepublic
as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and thelives of our comrades in arms to the
cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and ofits exaltation among the nations.
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of everyIrishman and Irishwoman. The
Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty,equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and
declares its resolve topursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts,cherishing
all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of thedifferences carefully fostered by an alien
Government, which have divided aminority from the majority in the past.
Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of apermanent National
Government, representative of the whole people of Irelandand elected by the suffrages of all her men and
women, the ProvisionalGovernment, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs ofthe
Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most HighGod, Whose blessing we
invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one whoserves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice,
inhumanity, or rapine. In thissupreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline, and by
thereadiness of its children to sacrice themselves for the common good, proveitself worthy of the august
destiny to which it is called.
Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government:
THOMAS J. CLARKE
SEAN Mac DIARMADA

P. H. PEARSE
JAMES CONNOLLY
THOMAS MacDONAGH
EAMONN CEANNT
JOSEPH PLUNKETT
Sean OCasey, The Plough and the Stars, from Act 2

Irish playwright Sean OCasey (1880-1964) had been involved with the Irish Republican Brotherhood before becoming
disillusioned with it. During the first run of his play The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre in 1926, members of
the audience rioted in protest of OCaseys critical representation of participants in the Easter Rising of 1916 and of a
prostitute seeking business. In the plays second act, set in a pub months before the Rising, a magnetic orator is
overheard offstage; the voice uses phrases drawn from the speeches of the leader of the Easter Rising, Padraic
Pearse. Pearses stirring nationalist language is juxtaposed with the Dublin vernacular of nationalist followers,
antinationalist skeptics, and a prostitute. In the course of the play, which continues during the Rising itself, OCasey
questions the meaning of the Easter Rising, which disrupts and renders tragic the lives of the plays ordinary
characters, some of whom are killed despite their being innocent bystanders.
ACT II
A commodious public house at the corner of the street in which the meeting is being addressed from Platform no. 1. It
is the south corner of the public house that is visible to the audience. The counter, beginning at back about one-fourth
of the width of the space shown, comes across two-thirds of the length of the stage, and, taking a circular sweep,
passes out of sight to left. On the counter are beer-pulls, glasses, and a carafe. The other three-fourths of the back is
48
occupied by a tall, wide, two-paned window. Beside this window at the right is a small, box-like, panelled snug. Next to
the snug is a double swing door, the entrance to that particular end of the house. Farther on is a shelf on which
customers may rest their drinks. Underneath the windows is a cushioned seat. Behind the counter at back can be seen
the shelves running the whole length of the counter. On these shelves can be seen the end (or the beginning) of rows
of bottles. The BARMAN is seen wiping the part of the counter which is in view. ROSIE is standing at the counter toying
with what remains of a half of whisky* in a wine-glass. She is a sturdy, well-shaped girl of twenty; pretty, and pert in
manner. She is wearing a cream blouse, with an obviously suggestive glad-neck; >> note 1 a grey tweed dress, brown
stockings and shoes. The blouse and most of the dress are hidden by a black shawl. She has no hat, and in her hair is
jauntily set a cheap, glittering, jewelled ornament. It is an hour later.
BARMAN
[wiping counter]. Nothin much doin in your line tonight, Rosie?
ROSIE.
Curse o God on th haporth, >> note 2 hardly, Tom. There isnt much notice taken of a pretty petticoat of a night
like this. . . . Theyre all in a holy mood. Th solemn-lookin dials >> note 3 on th whole o them an they marchin to th
meetin. Youd think they were th glorious company of th saints, an th noble army of martyrs thrampin through th
sthreets of paradise. Theyre all thinkin of higher things than a girls garthers. . . . Its a tremendous meetin; four
platforms they have theres one o them just outside opposite th window.
BARMAN.
Oh, ay; sure when th speaker comes [motioning with his hand] to th near end, here, you can see him plain,
an hear nearly everythin hes spoutin out of him.*
ROSIE.
Its no joke thryin to make up fifty-five shillins a week for your keep an laundhry, an then taxin you a quid for
your own room if you bring home a friend for th night. . . . If I could only put by a couple of quid for a swankier outfit,
everythin in th garden ud look lovely
BARMAN.
Whisht, till we hear what hes sayin.
Through the window is silhouetted the figure of a tall man who is speaking to the crowd. The BARMAN and ROSIE look
out of the window and listen.
THE VOICE OF THE MAN.
It is a glorious thing to see arms in the hands of Irishmen. We must accustom ourselves to the
thought of arms, we must accustom ourselves to the sight of arms, we must accustom ourselves to the use of
arms. . . . Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its
manhood. . . . There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!*
The figure moves away towards the right, and is lost to sight and hearing.
ROSIE.
Its th sacred thruth, mind you, what that mans afther sayin.
BARMAN.
ROSIE
If I was only a little younger, Id be plungin mad into th middle of it!
[who is still looking out of the window]. Oh, heres the two gems runnin over again for their oil!
and FLUTHER enter tumultuously. They are hot, and full and hasty with the things they have seen and heard.
Emotion is bubbling up in them, so that when they drink, and when they speak, they drink and speak with the fullness
of emotional passion. PETER leads the way to the counter.
PETER
[splutteringly to BARMAN]. Two halves . . . [To FLUTHER] A meetin like this always makes me feel as if I could
dhrink Loch >> note 4 Erinn dhry!
PETER
FLUTHER.
You couldnt feel any way else at a time like this when th spirit of a man is pulsin to be out fightin for th
thruth with his feet thremblin on th way, maybe to th gallows, an his ears tinglin with th faint, far-away sound of
burstin rifle-shots thatll maybe whip th last little shock o life out of him thats left lingerin in his body!
PETER.
I felt a burnin lump in me throat when I heard th band playin The Soldiers Song >> note 5 rememberin last
hearin it marchin in military formation with th people starin on both sides at us, carryin with us th pride an resolution
o Dublin to th grave of Wolfe Tone. >> note 6
FLUTHER.
Get th Dublin men goin an theyll go on full force for anything thats thryin to bar them away from what
theyre wantin, where th slim thinkin counthry boyo ud limp away from th first faintest touch of compromisation!
49
[hurriedly to the BARMAN]. Two more, Tom! . . . [To FLUTHER] Th memory of all th things that was done, an all th
things that was suffered be th people, was boomin in me brain. . . . Every nerve in me body was quiverin to do
somethin desperate!
PETER
FLUTHER.
Jammed as I was in th crowd, I listened to th speeches pattherin on th peoples head, like rain fallin on th
corn; every derogatory thought went out o me mind, an I said to meself, You can die now, Fluther, for youve seen th
shadow-dhreams of th past leppin to life in th bodies of livin men that show, if we were without a titther o courage for
centuries, were vice versa now! Looka here. [He stretches out his arm under PETERs face and rolls up his sleeve.] The
blood was BOILIN in me veins!
The silhouette of the tall figure again moves into the frame of the window speaking to the people.
[unaware, in his enthusiasm, of the speakers appearance, to FLUTHER]. I was burnin to dhraw me sword, an
wave an wave it over me
PETER
FLUTHER
[overwhelming PETER]. Will you stop your blatherin for a minute, man, an let us hear what hes sayin!
VOICE OF THE MAN.
Comrade soldiers of the Irish Volunteers and of the Citizen Army, we rejoice in this terrible war. The
old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. . . . Such august homage was never
offered to God as this: the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country. And we must be ready to pour out
the same red wine in the same glorious sacrifice, for without shedding of blood there is no redemption!*
The figure moves out of sight and hearing.
FLUTHER
[gulping down the drink that remains in his glass, and rushing out]. Come on, man; this is too good to be
missed!
finishes his drink less rapidly, and as he is going out wiping his mouth with the back of his hand he runs into THE
coming in. He immediately erects his body like a young cock, and with his chin thrust forward, and a look of
venomous dignity on his face, he marches out.
PETER
COVEY
[at counter]. Give us a glass o malt,* for Gods sake, till I stimulate meself from the shock o seein th sight
thats afther goin out!
THE COVEY
[all business, coming over to the counter, and standing near THE COVEY]. Another one for me, Tommy; [to
the BARMAN] th young gentlemans ordherin it in th corner of his eye.
ROSIE
The BARMAN brings the drink for the covey, and leaves it on the counter. ROSIEwhips it up.
BARMAN.
Ay, houl on there, houl on there, Rosie!
[to the BARMAN]. What are you houldin on out o you for? Didnt you hear th young gentleman say that he
couldnt refuse anything to a nice little bird? [To THE COVEY] Isnt that right, Jiggs? >> note 7 [THE COVEY says nothing.]
Didnt I know, Tommy, it would be all right? It takes Rosie to size a young man up, an tell th thoughts that are
thremblin in his mind. Isnt that right, Jiggs?
ROSIE
THE COVEY
ROSIE
stirs uneasily, moves a little farther away, and pulls his cap over his eyes.
[moving after him]. Great meetin thats gettin held outside. Well, its up to us all, anyway, to fight for our freedom.
THE COVEY
[to BARMAN]. Two more, please. [To ROSIE] Freedom! Whats th use o freedom, if its not economic freedom?
[emphasising with extended arm and moving finger]. I used them very words just before you come in. A lot o
thricksters, says I, that wouldnt know what freedom was if they got it from their mother. . . . [To BARMAN] Didnt I,
Tommy?
ROSIE
BARMAN.
I disremember.
ROSIE.
No, you dont disremember. Remember you said, yourself, it was all only a flash in th pan. Well, flash in th
pan, or no flash in th pan, says I, theyre not goin to get Rosie Redmond, says I, to fight for freedom that wouldnt be
worth winnin in a raffle!
50
THE COVEY.
Theres only one freedom for th workin man: conthrol o th means o production, rates of exchange, an th
means of disthribution. [TappingROSIE on the shoulder] Look here, comrade, Ill leave here tomorrow night for you a
copy of Jenerskys Thesis on the Origin, Development, an Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the
Proletariat. >> note 8
[throwing off her shawl on to the counter, and showing an exemplified glad neck, which reveals a good deal of a
white bosom]. If yass Rosie, its heartbreakin to see a young fella thinkin of anything, or admirin anything, but silk
thransparent stockins showin off the shape of a little lassies legs!
ROSIE
THE COVEY,
frightened, moves a little away.
[following on]. Out in th park in th shade of a warm summery evenin, with your little darlin bridie to be, kissin
an cuddlin [she tries to put her arm around his neck], kissin an cuddlin, ay?
ROSIE
[frightened]. Ay, what are you doin? None o that, now; none o that. Ive something else to do besides
shinannickin >> note 9 afther Judies! [He turns away, but ROSIE follows, keeping face to face with him.]
THE COVEY
ROSIE.
Oh, little duckey, oh, shy little duckey! Never held a mots >> note 10hand, an wouldnt know how to
tittle >> note 11 a little Judy! [She clips him under the chin.] Tittle him undher th chin, tittle him undher th chin!
THE COVEY
[breaking away and running out]. Ay, go on, now; I dont want to have any meddlin with a lassie like you!
[enraged]. Jasus, its in a monasthery some of us ought to be, spendin our holidays kneelin on our
adorers, >> note 12 tellin our beads, an knockin hell out of our buzzums!
ROSIE
Martin McDonagh, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, scenes 1 and 2

Martin McDonagh was born in London in 1970; his parents were Irish. His 2001 play is about an Irish terrorist fighting
to free Northern Ireland of English rule who is utterly indifferent to human suffering but since boyhood has adored his
cat. McDonagh plays on the absurdities and incongruities of fanaticism, humorously presenting even scenes of torture
and violent bloodshed. The play, the beginning of which is excerpted here, eventually ends in carnage, with corpses,
body parts, and blood covering the stage.
Characters
Donny, mid-forties. Padraics father. From Inishmore.
Davey, seventeen. Slightly overweight, long hair. From Inishmore.
Padraic, twenty-one. Handsome. From Inishmore.
Mairead, sixteen. Cropped hair, pretty. Daveys sister. From Inishmore.
James, twenties/thirties. Northern Irish.
Christy, thirties/forties. Northern Irish.
Brendan, twenty. Northern Irish.
Joey, twenty. Northern Irish.
The play is set in 1993 on the island of Inishmore, County Galway. >> note 1
Scene One
A cottage on Inishmore1 circa 1993. Front door in centre of back wall, a window to its left and right. Exit stage left to a
bathroom, unseen, an open area forward right to signify another room. A clock somewhere on back wall along with a
framed piece of embroidery reading Home Sweet Home. Cupboards left and right, a telephone on one of them. A
couple of armchairs near the back wall and a table centre, on which, as the play begins, lies a dead black cat, its head
half missing. Donny, the middle-aged owner of the house, and Davey, a long-haired, slightly pudgy neighbour of
seventeen, stand staring quietly at this cat for a few moments.
Davey Do you think hes dead, Donny?
51
Pause. Donny picks up the limp dead cat. Bits of its brain plop out. Donnylooks across at Davey and puts the cat back
down again.
Donny Aye.
Davey He might be in a coma. Would we ring the vet?
Donny Its more than a vet this poor feck needs.
Davey If he gave him an injection?
Donny (pause)
Have this injection, you!
Donny steps back and kicks Davey up the arse.

Davey(almost crying) What was that fer?!
Donny How many times have people told you, hairing down that bastarding hill on that bastarding bicycle?
Davey I didnt touch the poor fella, I swear it! In the road I saw him lying . . . !
Donny In the road me arsehole!
DaveyAnd I wasnt hairing at all, I was going slow. And a black lump ahead in the road I saw, and what the devils that,
I said to meself. . .
Donny After youd rode over him, aye, and then probably reversed!
Davey Ahead in the road, Im saying, and dont be slinging reversed at me.
Donny Ill be slinging what I like!
DaveyAnd I was off me bike be that time anyway and just wheeling it along, and when I saw it was Wee Thomas didnt
I scoop him up and run him into you as quick as me legs could carry me?
Donny The first thing the books say is dont be moving an accident victim till professional fecking help arrives, and a
fool knows that!
Davey Well, I dont be reading books on cats being knocked down, Donny!
Donny Well, maybe you should, now . . .
Davey Because there are no such books!
Donny . . . And maybe Thomas would still be with us then.
Davey A car it must have been clobbered him.
Donny No cars have been down that road all day, and when do cars ever come down that road? Youre the only
bastard comes down that lonely road and why? Because youre a cowshite eejit with nothing better to do than roar
down roads on your mams bicycle for no reason other than to feel the wind in that girls mop o hair of yours!
Davey If youre insulting me hair again, Donny Osbourne, Ill be off right this minute. After going out of me way to bring
your cat in to you . . .
Donny After squashing the life out of me cat, and he isnt my cat at all . . .
Davey So as not to let the oul flies be picking the meat off him. A favour I was doing you.
Donny Its a favour now! With half of that cats head poking out of the spokes of your wheels, Ill bet, and its a favour
youre doing me!
52
Davey stares at Donny a moment, then darts out through the front door.Donnygoes over to the cat and strokes it
sadly, then sits in the armchair stage left, looking at the cats blood on his hands. Davey returns a few moments later,
dragging his mums bicycle in through the door. It is pink, with small wheels and a basket. He brings it right over
for Donny to see, raises its front wheel so that its almost in Donnys face, and starts slowly spinning it.
Davey Now wheres your cats head? Eh? Now wheres your cats head?
Donny (depressed) Scraping it off on the way wouldnt have been a hard job.
Davey Theres no cats head on that bicycle wheel. Not even a stain, nor the comrade of a stain, and the state of Wee
Tommy youd have had lumps of brain pure dribbling.
Donny Put your bicycle out of me face, now, Davey.
Davey Poor Wee Thomass head, a bicycle wouldnt do damage that decent. Damage that decent youd have to go out
of your way to do.
Donny Your bicycle out of me face, Im saying, or itll be to your head therell be decent damage done.
Davey leaves the bike at the front door.
Davey Either a car or a big stone or a dog youd need to do that decent damage. And youd hear a dog.
Donny And youd hear a car.
Davey (pause) Youd probably hear a big stone too. It depends on how big and from what distance. Poor Wee
Thomas. I did like him, I did. Which is more than I can say for most of the cats round here. Most of the cats round here
I wouldnt give a penny for. Theyre all full of themselves. Like our Maireads cat. Youd give him a pat, hed outright
sneer. But Wee Thomas was a friendly cat. He would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall.
(Pause.) He wont be saying hello no more, God bless him. Not with that lump of brain gone. (Pause.) And you havent
had him long at all, have you, Donny? Wasnt he near brand new?
Donny He isnt my fecking cat at all is what the point of the fecking matter is, and you know full well.
Davey I dont know full well. What . . . ?
Donny Only fecking looking after the bastard I was the year.
Davey Who were you fecking looking after him for, Donny?
Donny Who do you think?
Davey (pause)
Not . . . not . . .
Donny Not what?

Davey (with horror)
Not your . . . not your . . .
Donny Aye.
Davey No!
Donny Why else would I be upset? I dont get upset over cats!
Davey Not your Padraic?!
Donny Aye, my Padraic.
Davey Oh Jesus Christ, Donny! Not your Padraic in the INLA?!
Donny Do I have another fecking Padraic?
Davey Wee Thomas is his?
53
Donny And was his since he was five years old. His only friend for fifteen year. Brought him out to me when he started
moving about the country bombing places and couldnt look after him as decent as he thought needed. His only friend
in the world, now.
Davey Was he fond of him?
Donny Of course he was fond of him.
Davey Oh hell be mad.
Donny He will be mad.
Davey As if he wasnt mad enough already. Padraics mad enough for seven people. Dont they call him Mad
Padraic?
Donny They do.
Davey Isnt it him the IRA wouldnt let in because he was too mad?
Donny It was. And he never forgave them for it.
Davey Maybe hes calmed down since hes been travelling.
Donny They tell me hes gotten worse. I can just see his face after he hears. And I can just see your face too, after he
hears your fault it was. I can see him plugging holes in it with a stick.
Davey (dropping to his knees) Oh please, Donny, I swear to God it wasnt me. Dont be saying my name to him, now.
Sure, Padraic would kill you for sweating near him, let alone this. Didnt he outright cripple the poor fella laughed at that
girly scarf he used to wear, and that was when he was twelve?!
Donny His first cousin too, that fella was, never minding twelve! And then pinched his wheelchair!
Davey Please now, Donny, you wont be mentioning my name to him?
Donny gets up and ambles around. Davey stands also.
Donny If you admit it was you knocked poor Thomas down, Davey, I wont tell him. If you carry on that it wasnt, then I
will. Them are your choices.
Davey But it isnt fecking fair, Donny!
Donny I dont know if it is or it isnt.
Davey I knew well I shouldve up and ignored the bastard when I saw him lying there, for if a black cat crossing your
path is bad luck, what must one of the feckers lying dead in front of you be? Worse luck. I killed Wee Thomas so, if
thats what you want to hear.
Donny How?
Davey How? However you fecking want, sure! I hit him with me bike, then I banged him with a hoe, then I jumped up
and down on the feck!
Donny You hit him with your bike, uh-huh, I suspected. But an accident it was?
Davey An accident, aye. A pure fecking accident.
Donny Well . . . fair enough if an accident is all it was.
Davey (pause)
So you wont be mentioning my name so?
Donny I wont be.

Davey Good-oh. (Pause.) Whenll you be informing him of the news?
54
Donny Ill give him a ring in a minute now. He has a mobile.

Davey Hell be furious.
Donny Ill tell him . . . Ill tell him Wee Thomas is poorly, Ill tell him. Aye . . .
Davey Sure hell know hes more than poorly, Donny, when he sees them brains bubbling away . . .
Donny Hes poorly but theres no need to be rushing home, Im saying . . .
Davey Im with you now, Donny . . .
Donny Do you get me? Hes just a tadeen off his food, like, Ill tell him. And in a week Ill say hes going downhill a
biteen. And in another week Ill say he passed away peaceful in his sleep, like.
Davey Youll be letting him down easy.
Donny Ill be letting him down easy.
Davey You wont give him the bad news all at once. Youll do it in stages, like.
Donny The last thing we want is Padraic roaring home to a dead cat, now.
Davey Oh Donny, thats the last thing in the world youd want.
Donny Thats the last thing youd want too. Youre the bastard brained him, youve admitted.
Davey goes to say something but doesnt, just squirms.
Donny Eh?
Davey Aye, aye, I am the bastard . . . (mumbling) for fecks sake . . .
Donny Ill give him a ring now, I will.
Davey (mumbling) Give him a ring now, for your fecking self, aye, ya feck.
Donny stands there biting his bottom lip. Davey goes to the door and picks up his bike.
Davey Drove on a-fecking-head I shouldve, I knew! Im too kind to little things is my fecking trouble!
Donny picks up the telephone, staring at the cat.
Donny Oh Wee Tommy, you poor beggar. As fecked up as you are, it mightnt be long till were just as fecked up as
you if that lube turns up. Just as fecked up? Twice as fecked up is more like.
Davey Three times as fecked up probably, Donny, or maybe four times?
Donny Be fecking off home you, ya cat brainer.
Davey I will. And Ill be braining some more cats on me way home, cos its me fecking hobby now, so it is.
Donny (absently) Dont be braining any more cats, now.
Davey sighs, rolls his eyes to the ceiling and wheels his bike out. Donnystarts dialling a number slowly, sadly. Fade to
black.
Scene Two
55
A desolate Northern Ireland warehouse or some such. James, a bare-chested, bloody and bruised man, hangs upside
down from the ceiling, his feet bare and bloody. Padraics idles near him, wielding a cut-throat razor, his hands bloody.
Around Padraics chest are strapped two empty holsters and there are two handguns on a table stage left. James is
crying.
Padraic
James? (Pause.) James?
James (sobbing) Wha?

Padraic
Do you know whats next on the agenda?
James I dont. And I dont want to know.

Padraic
I know well you dont, you big feck. Look at the state of you, off bawling like some fool of a girl.
James Is a fella not supposed to bawl so, you take his fecking toenails off him?
Padraic (pause) Dont be saying feck to me, James . . .
James Im sorry, Padraic . . .
Padraic
Or youll make me want to give you some serious bother, and not just be tinkering with you.
James Is toenails off just tinkering with me, so?

Padraic
It is.
James Oh, its just fecking tinkering with me toenails off is . . .

Padraic James Hanley, dont keep going on about your stupid fecking toenails! The way you talk it sounds as if I
took off a rake of them, when it was only two I took off, and them only small ones. If theyd been big ones I could
understand, but they werent. They were small. Youd hardly notice them gone. And if it was so concerned you were
about the health of them toenails it wouldve been once in a while you cleaned out the muck from under them.
James Well, youve saved me that job for good now anyways.
Padraic If I hadnt been such a nice fella I wouldve taken one toenail off of separate feet, but I didnt, I took two
toenails off the one foot, so that its only the one foot youll have to be limping on and not the two. If it had been the two
youdve found it a devil to be getting about. But with the pain concentrated on the one, if you can get hold of a crutch
or a decent stick, Im not sure if the General Hospital does hand them out but they might do, I dont know. You could
phone them up and ask, or go in and see them would be the best thing, and make sure them toes wont be going septic
at the same time. I didnt disinfect this razor at all, I never do, I see no need, but theyd be the best people to ask, sure
theyre the experts. Youll probably need a tetanus jab too, oh theres no question. I do hate injections, I do. I think Id
rather be slashed with a razor than have an injection. I dont know why. Of course, Id rather have neither. Youll have
had both by the end of the day. What a bad day youve had. (Pause.) But, em . . . I have lost me train of thought now,
so I have.
James Youve lost your train of thought? Uh-huh. As slow as that fecking train is, and youve lost it?
Padraic (pause) The next item on the agenda is which nipple of yours do you want to be saying goodbye to. The right
or the left?
James No, now. Come on, now . . . !
Padraic Be picking, Im saying! Whichevers your favourite nipple I wont be touching that fella at all, Ill be
concentrating on the other. Ill be giving him a nice sliceen and then probably be feeding him to ya, but if you dont pick
and pick quick itll be both of the boys youll be waving goodbye to, and waving goodbye to two tits when theres no
need but to wave goodbye to one makes no sense at all as far as I can see. In my eyes, like. In fact its the mark of a
madman. So be picking your nipple and well get the ball rolling, for I have better things to do with me time than to be
hanging around warehouses cutting your nipples off, James Hanley.
James (crying)
But Ive done nothing at all to deserve nipples off, Padraic!
56
Padraic Oh, lets not be getting into the whys and wherefores, James. You do push your filthy drugs on the
schoolchildren of Ireland, and if you concentrated exclusive on the Protestants Id say all well and good, but you dont,
you take all comers.
James Marijuana to the students at the Tech I sell, and at fair rates . . . !
Padraic Keeping our youngsters in a drugged-up and idle haze, when its out on the streets pegging bottles at
coppers they should be.
James Sure, everybody smokes marijuana nowadays.
Padraic
I dont!
James Well, maybe you should! It might calm you down!

Padraic
Be picking your nipple, Im saying!
James Paul McCartney says it should be outright legalised! He says its less bad than booze and it cures epileptics!
Padraic
Say goodbye to them both so.
James He has statistics, Padraic!

Padraic approaches him quickly with the razor.
James The right one! The right one!
Padraic takes Jamess right tit in his hand so that the nipple points out, and is just about to slice it off . . .
Padraic
Grit your teeth, James. This may hurt.
James (screaming) No . . . !
. . . when the cellphone in Padraics back pocket rings loudly.
Padraic
Will you hang on there a minute, James . . . ?
Padraic answers the phone, idling away from James, who is left shaking and whimpering behind him.
(Into phone.) Hello? Dad, ya bastard, how are you? (To James.) Its me dad. (Pause.) Im grand indeed, Dad, grand.
How is all on Inishmore? Good-oh, good-oh. Im at work at the moment, Dad, was it important now? Im torturing one of
them fellas pushes drugs on wee kids, but I cant say too much over the phone, like . . .
James (crying)
Marijuana, Padraic.
Padraic They are terrible men, and its like they dont even know they are, when they know well. They think theyre
doing the world a favour, now. (Pause.) I havent been up to much else, really. I put bombs in a couple of chip shops,
but they didnt go off. (Pause.) Because chip shops arent as well guarded as army barracks. Do I need your advice on
planting bombs? (Pause.) I was pissed off, anyways. The fella who makes our bombs, hes fecking useless. I think he
does drink. Either they go off before youre ready or they dont go off at all. One thing about the IRA anyways, as much
as I hate the bastards, youve got to hand it to them, they know how to make a decent bomb. (Pause.) Sure, why would
the IRA be selling us any of their bombs? They need them themselves, sure. Those bastardsd charge the earth
anyways. Ill tell ya, Im getting pissed off with the whole thing. Ive been thinking of forming a splinter group. (Pause.) I
know were already a splinter group, but theres no law says you cant splinter from a splinter group. A splinter group is
the best kind of group to splinter from anyways. It shows you know your own mind (Whispering.), but theres someone
in the room, Dad, I cant be talking about splinter groups. (To James, politely.) Ill be with you in a minute now, James.
James shudders slightly.
Padraic
What was it you were ringing about anyways, Dad?
Pause. Padraics face suddenly becomes very serious, eyes filling with tears.
57
Eh? What about Wee Thomas? (Pause.) Poorly? How poorly, have you brought him to the doctor? (Pause.) How long
has he been off his food, and why didnt you tell me when it first started? (Pause.) Hes not too bad? Either hes poorly
or hes not too bad now, Dad, hes either one or the fecking other, theres a major difference, now, between not too bad
and fecking poorly, he cannot be the fecking two at fecking once, now, (Crying heavily.) and you wouldnt be fecking
calling me at all if he was not too bad, now! What have you done to Wee Thomas now, you fecking bastard? Put Wee
Thomas on the phone. Hes sleeping? Well, put a blanket on him and be stroking and stroking him and get a second
opinion from the doctor and dont be talking loud near him and Ill be home the first fecking boat in the fecking morning.
Ar, you fecker, ya!
Padraic smashes the phone to pieces on the table, shoots the pieces a few times, then sits there crying quietly. Pause.
James Is anything the matter, Padraic?
Padraic
Me cats poorly, James. Me best friend in the world, he is.
James Whats wrong with him?

Padraic
I dont know, now. Hes off his food, like.
James Sure thats nothing to go crying over, being off his food. He probably has ringworm.
Padraic
Ringworm? Is that serious, now?
James Sure, ringworm isnt serious at all. Just get him some ringworm pellets from the chemist and feed them him
wrapped up in a bit of cheese. They dont like the taste of ringworm pellets, cats, so if you hide them in a bit of cheese
hell eat them unbeknownst and never know the differ, and hell be as right as rain in a day or two, or at the outside
three. Just dont exceed the stated dose. Yknow, read the instructions, like.
Padraic
How do you know so much about ringworm?
James Sure, dont I have a cat of me own I love with all my heart, had ringworm a month back?
Padraic
Do ya? I didnt know drug pushers had cats.
James Sure, drug pushers are the same as anybody underneath.

Padraic
Whats his name?
James Eh?
Padraic
Whats his name?
James Em, Dominic. (Pause.) And I promise not to sell drugs to children any more, Padraic. On Dominics life I
promise. And thats a big promise, because Dominic means more to me than anything.
Padraic (pause) Are you gipping me now, James?
James Im not gipping you. This is a serious subject.
Padraic approaches James with the razor and slices through the ropes that bind him. James falls to the floor in a
heap, then half picks himself up, testing out his weight on his bloody foot. Padraic holsters his guns.
Padraic
How are them toes?
James Theyre perfect, Padraic.

Padraic
You admit you deserved the toes at least?
James Oh I did. The toes and an arm, really.

Padraic
Do you have money to get the bus to the hospital?
James I dont.
58
Padraic gives the confused James some change.

Padraic
Because you want to get them toes looked at. The last thing you want now is septic toes.
James Oh dyou know, thats the last thing Id want.

Padraic
Im off to Galway to see me cat.
Padraic exits.
James (calling out)
And I hope by the time you get home hes laughing and smiling and as fit as a fiddle, Padraic!
Pause. Sound of a distant outer door banging shut.

(Crying.) I hope that hes dead already and buried in shite, you stupid mental fecking bastard, ya!
Blackout.
Fiona Barr, The Wall-Reader
Fiona Barr, born in 1952 in Derry/Londonderry, depicts a young mother who reads political murals for pleasure while
strolling her child through the streets of Belfast. The Wall-Reader illustrates Northern Irelands tense political
environment, where seemingly harmless and everyday activities such as walks, conversation, and pleasure reading
can instigate the threat of violence and lead to flight and exile.
Shall only our rivers run free? The question jumped out from the cobbled wall in huge white letters, as The
Peoples taxi swung round the corner at Beechmount.
Looks like paint is running freely enough down here, she thought to herself, as other slogans glided past in rapid
succession. Reading Belfasts grim graffiti had become an entertaining hobby for her, and, she often wondered, was it
in the dead of night that groups of boys huddled round a paint tin daubing walls and gables with tired political slogans
and dichs? Did anyone ever see them? Was the guilty brush ever found? The brush is mightier than the bomb, she
declared inwardly, as she thought of how celebrated among journalists some lines had become.
Is there a life before death?
Well, no one had answered that one yet, at least, not in this city.
The shapes of Belfast crowded in on her as the taxi rattled over the ramps outside the fortressed police barracks.
Dilapidated houses, bricked-up terraces, splintered chaos and amputated life, rosy-cheeked soldiers, barely out of
school, and quivering with high-pitched fear. She thought of the thick-lipped youth who came to hi-jack the car, making
his point by showing his revolver under his anorak, and of the others, jigging and taunting every July, almost sexual in
their arrogance and hatred. Meanwhile, passengers climbed in and out at various points along the road, manoeuvering
between legs, bags of shopping and umbrellas. The taxi swerved blindly into the road. No Highway Code here. As the
womans stop approached, the taxi swung up to the pavement, and she stepped out.
She thought of how she read walls like tea-cups and she smiled to herself. Pushing her baby in the pram to the
supermarket, she had to pass under a motorway bridge that was peppered with lines, some in irregular lettering with
the paint dribbling down the concrete, others written with felt-tip pens in minute secretive hand. A whole range of
human emotions splayed itself with persistent anarchy on the walls. Messages: Ring me at eight, dont be late;
declarations: Two bob and shes yours; exclamations: Man. Utd. are fab; political jabs: Orange squash great, and
notes of historical import: 3rd Tank Regiment wuz here. Oh how she longed to linger under the bridge taking each wall
in turn, studying the meanest scrawl, pondering sensitivity, evaluating character, identifying subconscious fears,
analysing childhoods.
One could do worse than be a reader of walls, she thought, twisting Frosts words. >> note 1 Instead, though, the
pram was rushed past the intriguing mural (murial as they call it here) with much gusto. Respectable housewives dont
read walls!
Her husband had arrived home early today because of a bomb scare in work, as he explained. Despite the
bombings which had propelled Northern Ireland onto the worlds screens and newspapers, most people regarded these
59
episodes as a fact of life now; tedious, disruptive at times and only of interest when fatalities occurred. The Troubles
as they were euphemistically named, remained for this couple as a remote, vaguely irritating wart on their life. They
were simply an ordinary (she often groaned at the oppressive banality of the word), middle-class, family hoping the
baby would marry a doctor thereby raising them in their autumn days to the select legions of the upper-class.
Each day their lives followed the same routine no harm in that sordid little detail, she thought. It helps structure
ones existence. He went to the office, she fed the baby, washed the rapidly growing mound of nappies, prepared the
dinner and looked forward to the afternoon walk. She had convinced herself she was happy with her lot, and yet felt
disappointed at the pangs of jealousy endured on hearing of a friends glamorous job or anothers academic and
erudite husband. If only someone noticed her from time to time, or even wrote her name on a wall declaring her
existence worthwhile, A fine mind or I was once her lover. That way, at least, she would have evidence that she was
making an impact on others.
That afternoon she dressed the baby and started out for her walk. Fantasy time her husband called it, Wallreading time, she knew it to be. On this occasion, however, she decided to avoid those concrete temptations and,
instead, visit the park. Out along the main road, she pushed the pram, pausing to gaze into the hardware stores
window, hearing the whine of the saracen as it thundered by, waking the baby and making her feel uneasy. A foot patrol
of soldiers strolled past, their rifles, lethal even in the brittle sunlight of this March day, lounged lovingly and relaxed in
the arms of their men. One soldier stood nonchalantly, almost impertinently, against a corrugated railing and stared at
her. She always blushed when she passed troops. Locked up in barracks with no women, she had told her husband.
(He remarked that she had a dirty mind). Hurrying out of the range of his eyes and possible sniper fire, she swung
downhill out onto Stockmans Lane and into Musgrave Park.
The park is ugly, stark and hostile. Even in summer when courting couples seek out secluded spots, like mating
cats, they reject Musgrave. There are a few trees, clustered together, standing like skeletons ashamed of their
nakedness. The rest is grass, a green wasteland speckled with puddles of gulls squawking over a worm patch. The
park is bordered by a hospital which has a military wing guarded by an army billet. The beauty of the place is its
silence. It has only this. And here silence means peace. Horror, pain, terror do not exist within these railings. Belfast is
beyond their boundaries, and past the frontiers of the eagerly forgetful imagination.
The hill up to the park bench was not the precipice it seemed, but the baby and pram were heavy. Ante-natal selfindulgence had taken its toll her midriff was now most definitely a bulge. With one final push, pram, baby and mother
reached the green wooden seat, and came to rest. The baby slept soundly with the soother touching her velvet pink
cheeks, hand on pillow, a picture of purity. The woman heard a coughing noise coming from the nearby gun turret, and
managed to see the tip of a rifle and a face peering out from the darkness. Smells of cabbage and burnt potatoes
wafted over from behind the slanting sheets of protective steel.
Is that your baby? an English voice called out. She could barely see the face belonging to the voice. She replied
yes, and smiled. The situation reminded her of the confessional. Dark and supposedly anonymous, Is that you, my
child? She knew the priest personally. Did he identify her sins with his Good morning, Mary, and think to himself, and
I know what you were up to last night! She blushed at the secrets given away through the ceremony. Yes, she
nervously answered again, it was her baby, a little girl. First-time mothers rarely resist the temptation to talk about their
offspring. Forgetting her initial shyness, she told the voice of when the baby was born, the early problems of all-night
crying, now teething, how she could crawl backwards and gurgle. In fact all the minutiae that unite mothers
everywhere.
The voice responded. It too had a son, a few months older than her child, away in Germany at the army base at
Mnster. The voice too talked with the quiet affection that binds fathers everywhere to their children. The English voice
talked out from the turret as if addressing the darkening lines of silhouettes in the distance beyond the park. Factory
pipes, chimney tops, church spires, domes all listened impassively to the Englishmans declaration of paternal love.
The scene was strange, for although Belfasts sterile geography slipped into classical forms with dusk and heavy rainclouds, the voice and the woman knew the folly of such innocent communication. They politely finished their
conversation, said goodbye and the woman pushed her pram homewards. The voice remained in the turret, watchful
and anxious. Home she went, past vanloads of workers leering out past the uneasy presence of foot patrols, past the
Church.
Let us give each other the sign of peace they said at Mass. The only sign Belfast knew was two fingers pointing
towards Heaven. Life was self-contained, the couple often declared, just like flats. No need to go outside.
She did go outside, however. Over the weeks the voice had become a name, John. It had become a friend,
someone to listen to, to talk to. No face, but a person removed from the citys grotesqueries and colourlessness. She
sat on the bench, the pram in front, the baby asleep, listening, talking, looking ahead at the hospital corridors stretching
languidly before her. He talked of his wife, and the city he came from. In some ways, remote as another planet, in
others as familiar as the earth itself. Memories of childhood aspirations grown out of back-to-back slum, of
disappointment, the pain of failure, the fear of rejection in adolescence. Visions of Germany, Teutonic efficiency and
emotional hardness; Malta and Cyprus, exotic, crimson, romantic, legendary, the holiday brochures come to life.
60
She told him of her family, of escaping through books, longing to endure noble pain and mysterious wildness, to
experience outrageous immorality, to be as aloof as Yeats himself. To be memorable, she told him, was her awful
imagination-consuming desire, even if only to have her name on a wall that would stand for centuries. She told him of
Donegal, its vitality and freshness, its windswept, heather-blown beauty, savage waves plummeting and spume
crashing onto sheer cliffs and jagged rocks. She tried to paint a picture of the place and tell how forlorn and vulnerable
it made her feel, but her expressions were inadequate, her words mere clichs. She felt she had begun to talk in
slogans.
Each week the voice and the woman learned more of each other. No physical contact was needed, no face-to-face
encounter to judge reaction, no touching to confirm amity, no threat of dangerous intimacy. It was a meeting of minds,
as she explained later to her husband, a new opinion, a common bond, an opening of vistas. He disclosed his
ambitions to become a pilot, to watch the land, fields and horizons spread out beneath him a patchwork quilt of
dappled colours and textures. She wanted to be remembered by writing on walls. And all this time the citys skyline and
distant buildings watched and listened.
It was April now. More slogans had appeared, white and dripping, on the city walls. Brits out. Peace in. A simple
equation for the writer. Loose talk claims lives, another shouted menacingly. The messages, the woman decided, had
acquired a more ominous tone. The baby had grown and could sit up without support. New political solutions had been
proposed and rejected, interparamilitary feuding had broken out and subsided, four soldiers and two policemen had
been blown to smithereens in separate incidents, and a building a day had been bombed by the Provos. >> note 2 It
had been a fairly normal month by Belfasts standards. The level of violence was no more or less acceptable than at
other times. Life has to continue, after all.
One day it was, perhaps, the last day in April her husband returned home panting and trembling a little. He
asked if she had been to the park, and she replied that she had. Taking her by the hand, he led her to the wall on the
left of their driveway. She felt her heart sink and thud. She felt her face redden. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She could
not speak. In huge angry letters the message spat itself out,
TOUT >> note 3
The four-letter word covered the whole wall. It clanged in her brain, its venom rushed through her body. Suspicion
was enough to condemn. What creature had skulked to paint the word? Whose arm, dismembered and independent,
had swung from tin to wall to deliver judgement? The job itself was not well done, she had seen better. The letters were
uneven, paint splattered down from the crossed T, the U looked a misshapen O. The workmanship was poor, the
impact perfect.
Her husband led her back into the kitchen. The baby was crying loudly but the woman did not seem to hear. Like
sleepwalkers, they sat down on the settee. The woman began to sob. Her shoulders heaved in bursts as she gasped
hysterically. Her husband took her in his arms gently and tried to make her sorrow his. Already he shared her fear.
What did you talk about? Did you not realise how dangerous it was? We must leave. He spoke quickly, making
plans. Selling the house and car, finding a job in London or Dublin, far away from Belfast, mortgages, removals,
savings, the tawdry affairs of normal living stunned her, making her more confused.
I told him nothing, she sobbed, what could I tell? We talked about life, everything, but not about here. She
trembled, trying to control herself.
We just chatted about reading walls, families, anything at all. Oh Sen, it was as innocent as that. A meeting of
minds we called it, for it was little else.
She looked into her husbands face and saw he did not fully understand. There was a hint of jealousy, of
resentment at not being part of their communion. Her hands fell on her lap, resting in resignation. What was the point of
explanation? She lifted her baby from the floor. Pressing the tiny face and body to her breast, she felt all her hopes and
desires for a better life become one with the childs struggle for freedom. How could she invite the trauma of war into
this new pure soul? Belfast and innocence. The two seemed incongruous and yet it must be done. The childs hands
wandered over her face, their eyes met. At once that moment of maternal and filial love eclipsed her fear, gave her the
impetus to escape.
For nine months she had been unable to accept the reality of her condition. Absurd, for the massive bump daily
shifted position and thumped against her. When her daughter was born, she had been overwhelmed by love for her
and amazed at her own ability to give life. By nature she was a dreamy person, given to moments of fancy. She played
out historical, romantic, literary roles in her imagination. She wondered at her competence in fulfilling the role of
mother. Could it be measured? This time she knew it could. She really did not care if they maimed her or even
murdered her. She did care about her daughter. She was her touchstone, her anchor to virtue. Not for her child a
61
legacy of fear, revulsion or hatred. With the few hours respite the painters had left between judgement and sentence
she determined to leave Belfasts walls behind.
The next few nights were spent in troubled, restless, sleep. The message remained on the wall outside. The
neighbours pretended not to notice and the matter was not discussed. She and the baby remained indoors despite the
refreshing May breezes and blue skies. Her husband had given in his notice at the office, for health reasons, he
suggested to his colleagues. All aunt had been contacted in Dublin. The couple did not answer knocks at the door,
carefully examined the shape and size of mail delivered and always paused when they answered the telephone.
Espionage and treachery were the order of the day, or so it seemed. It was time for reappraisal, for scrutiny of goals in
life and the opportunity for survival. They agreed they had to escape for their lives were at risk now. Touting is
punishable by death, tradition has ordained it so. The cause and its victory must be pursued.
Their cases and tea-chests were packed in the hallway. Old wedding gifts, still unused, library books hopelessly
out-of-date, maternity clothes and sports wear, chipped ornaments and cutlery. They cluttered up the place as they
awaited the day of departure. An agent was taking care of selling the house and getting a suitable price. A job was
promised with an insurance company in Dublin, and their aunt had prepared a room for them. They told no one in the
street. They would write later (omitting the address, naturally), enclosing a cheque for milk and bread bills. Every
eventuality was covered, every potential loop-hole filled. Their exodus, their little conspiracy, was planned with
exactitude and cunning. Then they waited for the night they were to leave home.
The mini-van was to call at eleven on Monday night, when it would be dark enough to park and pack their
belongings and themselves without too much suspicion being aroused. The firm had been very understanding when
the nature of their work had been explained; there was no conflict of loyalties involved in the exercise. They agreed to
drive them to Dublin at extra cost, changing drivers at Newry on the way down.
Monday finally arrived. The couple nervously laughed about how smoothly everything had gone. Privately, they
each expected something to go wrong. The baby was fed, and played with, the radio listened to and the clock watched.
The hours dragged by as the couple waited for eleven to chime.
She wondered what had happened to the voice, John. Had he missed her visits? Was he safe? Quickly she
dismissed him from her thoughts. It was her selfishness and silly notions that had got them into this mess. She never
had a great store of moral courage, content to lie down and accept in true Croppy fashion, as her husband always said.
She had never been outstanding or bold, having gone along as peacefully as possible. It was her child who had given
her strength, life and freedom from her old self. But would they make it?
They listened to the news at nine. Huddled together in their anxiety, they kept vigil in the darkening room. Rain had
begun to pour from black thunder clouds. Everywhere it was quiet and still. Hushed and cold they waited. Ten oclock,
and it was now dark. A blustery wind had risen making the lattice separation next door bang and clatter. At ten to
eleven, her husband went into the sittingroom to watch for the mini-van. His footsteps clamped noisily on the
floorboards as he paced back and forth. The baby slept.
A black shape glided slowly up the street and backed into the driveway. It was eleven. The van had arrived. Her
husband asked to see identification and then they began to load up the couples belongings. Settee, chairs, television,
washing machine all were dumped hastily, it was no time to worry about breakages. She stood holding the sleeping
baby in the livingroom as the men worked anxiously between van and house. The scene was so unreal, the
circumstances absolutely incredible, she thought What have I done? Recollections of her naivety, her insensitivity to
historical fact and political climate were stupefying. She had seen women who had been tarred and feathered, heard of
people who had been shot in the head, boys who had been knee-capped, all for suspected fraternising with troops. The
catalogue of violence spilled out before her as she realised the gravity and possible repercussions of her alleged
misdemeanour.
A voice called her, Mary, come on now. We have to go. Dont worry, were all together. Her husband led her to the
locked and waiting van. Handing the baby to him, she climbed up beside the driver, took the baby as her husband sat
down beside her and waited for the engine to start. The van slowly manoeuvered out onto the street and down the
main road. They felt more cheerful now, a little like refugees seeking safety and freedom not too far away. As they
approached the motorway bridge, two figures with something clutched in their hands stood side by side in the
darkness. She closed her eyes tightly, expecting bursts of gunfire. The van shot past. Relieved, she asked her husband
what they were doing at this time of night.
Writing slogans on the wall he replied.
The furtiveness of the painters seemed ludicrous and petty as she recalled the heroic and literary characteristics
with which she had endowed them. What did they matter? The travellers sat in silence as the van sped past the city
suburbs, the glare of police and army barracks, on out and further out into the countryside. Past sleeping villages and
silent fields, past white-washed farmhouses and barking dogs. On to Newry where they said goodbye to their driver as
62
the new one stepped in. Far along the coast with Rostrevors twinkling lights opposite the bay, down to the Border
check and a drowsy soldier waving them through. Out of the North, safe, relieved and heading for Dublin.
She noticed, as the van drove along the Liffey quay that wall messages existed here too. Their meanness
saddened her. Wall-reading had been fun, a spur for the imagination, a way to be remembered. All her life she had
longed to be remembered through walls, the peoples medium. Now the medium itself was as destructive, as
deadening as the concrete it was written on. She had neither the strength of character nor the fine moral fibre
necessary to be remembered. Yet, strangely, despite disappointment, she felt glad in a peculiar way and not such an
abysmal failure after all. One person, the voice John at least, would deliver her memory to his family and friends, would
perhaps pray for her ambitions and maybe even admire her simple-minded ignorance of Belfasts sordid heart.
Some days later in Belfast the neighbours discovered the house vacant, the people next door received a letter and
a cheque from Dublin. Remarks about the peculiar couple were made over hedges and cups of coffee. The message
on the wall was painted over by the couple who had bought the house when it went up for sale. They too were ordinary
people, living a self-contained life, worrying over finance and babies, promotion and local gossip. He too had an office
job, but his wife was merely a housekeeper for him. She was sensible, down to earth, and not in the least inclined to
wall-reading.
Michael Longley, Ceasefire
Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, born in Belfast in 1939 to a Protestant family, first published Ceasefire in an Irish
newspaper just a day before the 1994 IRA ceasefire. Longley distances the immediacy of the Troubles in this poem by
imagining a scene from Homers Iliad, particularly the moment of reconciliation between Agamemnon and Achilles after
the slaying of Hector.
Ceasere >> note 1

I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness lled the building.
II
Taking Hectors corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old kings sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each others beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:
IV
I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles hand, the killer of my son.
1994
Declaration of Support from The Good Friday Agreement
The Good Friday Agreement was signed by most of Northern Irelands political parties in Belfast on April 10, 1998 and
passed by referendum by voters in Ireland and Northern Ireland in May. The Declaration of Support (the first page of
the Agreement) announces a new beginning for Northern Ireland by establishing the commitment by both political
groups (British Unionist and Irish Nationalist) to self-governance and to resolving political and cultural differences by
exclusively democratic and peaceful means. John Hume and David Trimble, two principle creators of The
Agreement, both won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998.
63
DECLARATION OF SUPPORT
1.
We, the participants in the multi-party negotiations, believe that the agreement we have negotiated offers a truly
historic opportunity for a new beginning.
2.
The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering. We must never forget
those who have died or been injured, and their families. But we can best honour them through a fresh start, in which
we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and
vindication of the human rights of all.
3.
We are committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships within Northern
Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands.
4.
We reaffirm our total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving
differences on political issues, and our opposition to any use or threat of force by others for any political purpose,
whether in regard to this agreement or otherwise.
5.
We acknowledge the substantial differences between our continuing, and equally legitimate, political
aspirations. However, we will endeavour to strive in every practical way towards reconciliation and rapprochement
within the framework of democratic and agreed arrangements. We pledge that we will, in good faith, work to ensure the
success of each and every one of the arrangements to be established under this agreement. It is accepted that all of
the institutional and constitutional arrangements - an Assembly in Northern Ireland, a North/South Ministerial Council,
implementation bodies, a British-Irish Council and a British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference and any amendments
to British Acts of Parliament and the Constitution of Ireland - are interlocking and interdependent and that in particular
the functioning of the Assembly and the North/South Council are so closely inter-related that the success of each
depends on that of the other.
6.
Accordingly, in a spirit of concord, we strongly commend this agreement to the people, North and South, for
their approval.
1.
Compare the Easter 1916 Proclamation with Yeatss poem about the Easter Rising, Easter, 1916
(NAEL 8, 2.2031). What are the differences between how the two texts represent the Irish nationalist
struggle? What is the significance of these differences? Are there similarities as well?
2.
Modern Irish writers supported Irish political independence but asked whether it should come at the
price of Irish lives. How does Sean OCasey represent Padraic Pearses call for blood sacrifice? Compare the
excerpt from the second act of OCaseys The Plough and the Stars with the Easter 1916 Proclamations
injunction that the Irish must sacrifice themselves for the common good. How does OCasey contextualize
Pearses fiery rhetoric? Is there a relationship, for example, between the prostitute Rosies approach to the
Covey and the effect of Pearses oratory on Peter and Fluther?
3.
The rise of Irish nationalism after the Easter Rising placed considerable demands on Irish writers to
produce works that remember the Rising as heroic and that support the cause of Irish independence. How do
Yeats in Easter, 1916 (NAEL 8, 2.2031) and Sean OCasey in The Plough and the Stars remember the
Rising? How do they negotiate the demands of Irish nationalism and their own skepticism? What evidence
can you find that they perceived Irish nationalism as liberating, constraining, or both?
4.
The immediacy and frequency of violence throughout the Troubles have forced Northern Irish writers
to ask how to respond to such violence. Is a writers role to offer explanation and reportage, consolatory
language and expressions of grief, or further questions? Should the violence be represented directly or
indirectly, as heroic or wasteful, as necessary or arbitrary? Consider how Northern Irish poets, in particular,
respond to the Troubles: see Seamus Heaneys The Grauballe Man, Punishment, and Casualty
(NAEL 8, 2.282530), and Paul Muldoons Meeting the British and Gathering Mushrooms (NAEL 8,
2.286971). If you were a writer living in the midst of political violence, how would you respond?
5.
A visitor to Northern Ireland might notice how much the history of the Troubles is on display
through murals on city streets. The protagonist of Fiona Barrs short story The Wall-Reader is fascinated by
the murals. But she learns, as have many Northern Irish people, that speaking to people on the other side of
the Protestant/Catholic divide can be dangerous. How does Barr suggest both the longing for uninhibited
communication and the dangers of speech amid the political turmoil of the North? What is the role of
language in both crossing sectarian divisions and in reinforcing them?
64
6.
Martin McDonaghs play The Lieutenant of Inishmore uses humor in representing the violence of the
conflict in Northern Ireland. In the first scenes of the play, how does McDonagh use humorous juxtapositions
to draw out the absurdities of fanatical devotion to a political cause? How, why, and to what effect does he
include comedy in his representation of torture and strife in the North?
7.
Compare how early-twentieth Irish writers, such as Yeats and OCasey, represent the Easter Rising,
with how later twentieth-century writers, such as Heaney or Muldoon, Barr or McDonagh, represent the
Troubles. Are there significant continuities and contrasts? What do you make of these?
8.
Many Irish and Northern Irish writers have felt a deep responsibility to represent the nation.
Sometimes, though, two different kinds of representationpolitical and imaginativeare at odds with one
another for Irish writers. On the one hand, Irish writers speak for the nation through their texts, and critics
sometimes read their words as political speech. On the other hand, these texts are artistic creations and
imaginative representations, which may not correspond to popular Irish political opinions. Consider how the
texts by any of the writers featured here join together, separate, or negotiate their political and imaginative
representations of Ireland.
The creation and passage of The Good Friday Agreement by Irish and Northern Irish people represented a
turning point in the history of the Troubles. Northern Irish writers have also worked artistically to aid the peace
process. Compare how Michael Longleys Ceasefire and The Declaration of Support from The Good
Friday Agreement imagine and hope for eventual peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
65

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In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniversary of

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Cry of the Children

"Alas, my children, why do you look at me?"

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Do you question the young children in the sorrow

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

"True," say the children, "it may happen

Race and Victorian Science

Colonialism and Gender

Instantly my visitors were silent, and waiting in attitudes of eager attention.

The Civilizing Mission

language is the best worth knowing?

According to J. J. Thomas's Froudacity, how has European imperialism interrupted the

Compare Joseph Chamberlain's assertion that violence is an unfortunate but necessary

According to Victorian anthropologists and social evolutionists, the criteria determining a

Today we know it as World War I, but those who lived through

Sir Henry Newbolt, Vita Lampada (1897-98)

Theres a breathless hush in the Close to-night

Whos for the trench

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

W. B. Yeats, from Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)

Siegfried Sassoon, Finished with the War: A Soldiers Declaration

Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920, 1921)

home to many deceits,

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again

The Cenotaph and no one there? That can never be.

Mina Loy, Brancusis Golden Bird

Brancusis Golden Bird1

Easter 1916 to the Troubles

Easter 1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic

SEAN Mac DIARMADA

Sean OCasey, The Plough and the Stars, from Act 2

[wiping counter]. Nothin much doin in your line tonight, Rosie?

Whisht, till we hear what hes sayin.

If I was only a little younger, Id be plungin mad into th middle of it!

VOICE OF THE MAN.

Ay, houl on there, houl on there, Rosie!

frightened, moves a little away.

Martin McDonagh, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, scenes 1 and 2

Have this injection, you!

Donny steps back and kicks Davey up the arse.

Donny Not what?

Not your . . . not your . . .

So you wont be mentioning my name so?

Donny I wont be.

Donny Ill give him a ring in a minute now. He has a mobile.

James? (Pause.) James?

James (sobbing) Wha?

Do you know whats next on the agenda?

James I dont. And I dont want to know.

James Is toenails off just tinkering with me, so?

James Oh, its just fecking tinkering with me toenails off is . . .

But Ive done nothing at all to deserve nipples off, Padraic!

James Well, maybe you should! It might calm you down!

Be picking your nipple, Im saying!

Say goodbye to them both so.

James He has statistics, Padraic!

Grit your teeth, James. This may hurt.

Will you hang on there a minute, James . . . ?

What was it you were ringing about anyways, Dad?

Me cats poorly, James. Me best friend in the world, he is.

James Whats wrong with him?

I dont know, now. Hes off his food, like.